Bombino at home in Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013. (c) Andy Morgan.

A small white car, branded with the words ‘Groupe Bambino’ and a crudely drawn electric guitar, is revving its wheels deeper and deeper into the soft sand of a side alley somewhere on the ragged outskirts of Niamey, the capital of Niger. Bombino cuts the engine and smiles. “I should have taken the turn at speed in second gear,” he chuckles at me without a hint of fluster. “But I had to answer my phone so I screwed up. No bother. We’ll just leave the car here and dig it out later.”

While he and his band unload their bush gear – guitars, battery powered amp, djembe, tea pot and stove – a gaggle of local kids gather around us to point and stare. They recognise Bombino instantly and giggle with excitement. He beams them a smile before sauntering off into the scrubland with his bandmates, his purple robe all a shimmer in the evening light.

Such escapes from the city’s noise and stress are a daily ritual for Bombino. “There’s no better place to play music than in the desert,” he tells me. “In complete tranquility.”

In normal times, Niamey is a laid-back place, sprawling along the banks of the great Niger River with plenty of greenery to break the monotony of shantytowns and dusty suburbs. But the Malian civil war is raging away only half a day’s drive north of here and a pall of paranoia has descended on the city. When I receive an invitation to join Bombino and his mates for a jam, a smoke and a round or two of Touareg tea up on the dunes beyond the city limits, it feels like something heaven-sent.

As we wander along a dried riverbed in the twilight hush, past mud and reed villages where women pounding their grain to salute Bombino, his mobile rings again. It’s his manager calling from the USA. Bombino gets plenty of calls from his manager these days. His new album Nomad, produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, is set for imminent worldwide release. North American and European tours are in the offing. The grinding carousel of showbiz duty beckons.

Bombino has been charting a steady international ascent since his last album Agadez and a documentary of the same name came out in 2010. Nomad, with its indi-fanboy-friendly rock distortion and jubilant desert wig-outs seems likely to make this 33-year old Touareg guitarist more famous on the international stage than any other Touareg musician in history besides Tinariwen.

What’s more extraordinary however is Bombino’s fame at home. He’s become a bona fide head-turning airtime-hogging star in his own country, not just amongst the Touareg, who mainly live in Niger’s northern deserts, but amongst the youth of the entire nation, including those belonging to other major ethnic groups such as the Hausa, Jerma and Toubou. That’s something that no other Touareg artists has ever managed to do, not even Tinariwen.

Bombino downs le premier, Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013. (c) Andy Morgan

Anyone who knows anything about the recent history of the Touareg, a nomadic people from the southern Sahara whose ancestral homelands were sliced up when frontiers were drawn across the Sahara in the early 1960s, will appreciate the groundbreaking importance of Bombino’s achievement. Now a marginalised minority in Algeria, Mali, Niger, Libya and Burkina Faso, the Touareg possess a deep and rich culture, but never before have they enjoyed any kind of cultural hegemony in their home nations. “There are plenty of people here in Niger who listen to our music but don’t understand our lyrics because we sing in a different language to theirs,” Bombino tells me with quiet pride. “But they like it. And thanks to Facebook and You Tube, our fans here can see what we’re doing all over the world.”

Now Bombino wants to convince the rest of the world that the Touareg are a tolerant and peace-loving people who are only trying to protect their millennial culture and essential freedoms. Not that the world ever needed convincing until a few years ago. For decades, the Touareg enjoyed a generally benign image as an oppressed Berber people who were impervious to the rabidly puritanical version of Islam that prevails in the Middle East and proud of their age-old nomadic ways, their music and their poetry.

Recently however, the Touareg name has been dragged through the mud thanks to its association with the rise of radical and violent jihadism in the Sahel. The truth is that only a small clique of Malian Touareg leaders, rather than the population as a whole, ever sought any kind of alliance with violent Al Qaida franchised terror groups in northern Mali. Despite this, the Touareg as a whole are now regularly lumped together with the mad spawn of Bin Laden in the mind of ill-informed global-war-on-terror bores the world over. No less of an ‘expert’ in West African affairs than Jeremy Clarkson was recently moved to refer to the Touareg as a bunch of gun-running terrorists during an episode of Top Gear.

“That man has no right to say that,” retorts Bombino when I tell him about Clarkson’s rebranding of his people. “History speaks for itself. The Touareg have never behaved in that way. Many of us never expected this outcome, or this connection. Because of two or three people, our entire community is suffering. It’s very serious because the future of our people hangs in the balance. France should have intervened five or ten years ago, when the terrorists first arrived in our desert. Now it must finish the battle it’s fighting in Mali. Because if it doesn’t, I’m telling you, things will explode.”

Bombino isn’t alone in thinking that only the French army stands in the way of all out ethnic war in northern Mali. Reports of Malian army attacks against innocent Touareg and Arab civilians have been stacking up in recent weeks. The blood of most southern Malians has been boiled into a fury by what they perceive to be Touareg complicity in their country’s calamitous fall from grace. In many ways, the future has never seemed more dark and threatening.

Bombino and the company car, Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013. (c) Andy Morgan

Which is why it has never been more urgent for Touareg musicians to speak up and educate the world about what’s really going on in the Sahel. But I get the impression that penning lyrical messages of urgent relelvance isn’t Bombino’s natural vocation. Many of the songs on Nomad are Touareg classics by other Touareg groups such as Tinariwen and Terakaft, whose lyrics have been stripped of their deeper poetry and boiled down to whoops and catchphrases that play a supporting role to the rolling desert grooves. “We interpret those songs in our own way, sometimes with our own lyrics” he says. “I like to play an old song which still moves people and at the same time give it a new sound, a new shape, just a bit faster and more energetic than before.”

The message and the poetry, both of which have been essential ingredients in most Touareg music until now, are a work in progress as far as Bombino is concerned. “We’ve begun to work on that aspect these past four or five months,” he offers when I try to probe, “because it’s very important to talk about those issues, to make people understand, to go beyond tribalism.”

Dan Auberbach’s instinctive ability to distil the essence of rock’n’roll and the blues has helped Bombino to perfect a whole new approach to Touareg music – a youthful, almost urban sound that’s resolutely anchored in the here and now. Its main ingredients are raw and rolling dance grooves and long dazzling displays of guitar work rather than lyrical subtlety or the urge to sharpen the minds of audiences back home.

This break with the past is partly intentional of course. “I have a huge respect for the old generation,” Bombino says, “but we’re in 2013 now. We can’t always remain in 1963 [the year of the first Touareg uprising in Mali]. Some of the old musicians are always in a state of revolt. But people must find another way. We must stop thinking in tribal terms, as Touareg or Hausas or whatever. We have to go beyond that.”

Nonetheless, like any Touareg musician of any age, Bombino has no intention of burning all the bridges to his past. That would be culturally impossible. “In some ways my style is a city sound,” he concedes. “But in truth, underneath, the open desert is always there. If you forget your beginnings, you’ll be like a tree without roots. Unstable.”

Bombino and band off to jam outside Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013 (c) Andy Morgan

Hence Bombino’s need for his daily fix of desert tranquillity on the dunes near his home in Niamey, mobile phones and adoring fans notwithstanding. The deep yearning Touareg feels for those infinite Saharan horizons with their blessed freedom from noise, pollution, crowds and time remains at the core of Bombino’s music. It’s also tattooed on his heart. And although he might not possess the lyrical skills of Touareg mentors like Ibrahim Abaraybone or Mohammed Japonais, Bombino cares deeply about what’s going on in his desert home.

“We’ve already suffered enough,” he tells me, those gentle deep-brown eyes tenderising his words. “We don’t want to be like Afghanistan. We only want peace. I don’t think that’s a lot to ask.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 20013

First published in The Guardian – April 2013

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In February 2013 I traveled to Niamey in search of Niger music. I spent time and drank plenty of tea with some inspiring musicians and they gracefully allowed me to take photos of them. The honour was all mine

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Touareg boy watching Camel Race, Tin Essako, Jan 2001

A few years ago, on a beautifully calm Saharan evening, I was drinking tea with an old Touareg musician in a garden near Tessalit in the far north east of Mali, a place that has recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons. The musician’s work was gaining popularity throughout Europe and North America, so I asked him if he would ever be tempted to leave northern Mali and emigrate to the west.

“The desert is my home,” he answered. “I’ve never been attracted by the idea of emigrating. It’s here that I belong. You have to live simply in the desert. It’s the only way. And simplicity is freedom.”

Disunity has crippled the Touareg cause ever since the French colonial army defeated the mighty Kel Ahaggar at the battle of Tit in 1902. But freedom is the one idea that binds the heart of every Touareg together. Indeed, the aspiration to be free is so central to the Touareg identity, that their own word for a true Touareg of noble mind and heart is amashagh, which simply means ‘free man’.

What does this freedom consist of? At its core lie a proud autonomy and self-reliance, to which interference or coercion, especially by a foreign power, are abhorrent. With that goes the freedom to move about the vastness of that ancestral desert without hindrance. Hence the deep wounds created by the new frontiers that sliced through Touareg lands in the early 1960s. Then there’s the freedom to manage the desert’s unique environment and natural resources according to local needs and customs; the freedom to be a nomad and to be left alone to live quietly in that blessed, or cursed, state of isolation which only a great empty wilderness like the Sahara desert allows.

There are also freedoms that most humans aspire to and which the Touareg share: freedom from taxes that yield no tangible benefit; freedom from corruption and abuse of power; the freedom to preserve and promote your own language and culture; the freedom to achieve personal advancement and happiness in whatever state you happen to be part of; the freedom to worship according to personal conviction and cultural tradition; the freedom to be open and hospitable to outsiders; the freedom to seek peace and prosperity.

There’s also the desire to live a life free from fear and violence, whether perpetrated by the state, by foreigners or by your neighbours. Good relations with the other ethnic groups that share the desert space – Arab, Peul, Songhoy, Arma, Toubou and others – are essential to the Touareg concept of freedom, because without peace of mind there can be no freedom. Strange as it may seem, until June1990 and the outbreak of the second great Touareg rebellion, good relations between the Touareg and their neighbours were the norm, not the exception. You have to back many decades before that conflict to find a case of open war between Touareg and Arab, or Touareg and Songhoi in the deserts of northern Mali, or Azawad, call it what you will.

I believe that the simplest way of formulating what is often referred to as ‘The Touareg Question’ is this: To what extent can the Touareg aspiration to freedom find fulfilment in the modern world? Indeed, can it exist at all in the context of the post-colonial multi-ethnic nation state?

If an answer to that question exists, then it requires some blue-sky thinking, especially now when many of the old formulas that have been applied since independence seem so bankrupt.

Let’s start with nationhood. Personally, I don’t believe that an independent state of Azawad is a possibility; not now and not for decades, even possibly centuries. Neither the social cohesion, the economic foundation nor the global support exist for such a state to succeed. And quite apart from that, Algeria would never let it happen.

Take away the issue of independence, however, and you’ll find that the aspirations of the average Touareg are basically the same as those of the average non-Touareg citizen of Mali, Algeria or Niger. Namely: less corruption, better schools and clinics, better transport infrastructure, fairer taxes and duties, more job opportunities and, in the case of other minorities, greater cultural recognition.

In some ways, the independence issue skews the argument in an unhelpful way. The rebellion of 1990 was fought not for independence but for greater investment in the north and advancement for northern Touareg and Arabs in the state of Mali and its institutions; in other words, it was fought in order to belong to Mali in a more meaningful way rather than to become more separate. Before 1990, these aspirations were shared by most northerners, whatever their ethnicity or skin colour. It was only fear and polarization brought about by conflict that broke down this empathy of aspiration and turned tribe against tribe.

Governments in the region need to concentrate on the aspirations that unite people rather than those that separate them. But alas, creating job opportunities, developing health and education and promoting minority cultures are often harder for a weak and corrupt government to achieve than maintaining control by turning ethnic groups against each other and keeping populations in a permanent state of fear. But find jobs for the youth, build schools and clinics and show respect for local culture and the desire for independence will wane.

In Mali, even the most enlightened policies in the north have little chance of success unless there’s a concerted effort to reorganise the country’s failed governmental structure. Rather than continue to parrot the mantra of ‘Mali, un et indivisible’ and blindly adopt the French Jacobin concept of a rigidly centralised state, why not look at the länder of Germany, the parliaments of Wales and Scotland, local government in Catalonia or even, dare I say it, Quebec and the federal system in Canada. Mali needs to find a new machinery of tribal, regional and national government, in which appropriate powers of decision-making, especially those relating to taxation, security, education and investment are devolved to structures that work like independent cogs in a larger machine. No easy task, I know, but there are plenty of examples around world that can serve as stimuli for blue-sky thinking in this regard.

The cultural aspirations of the Touareg, indeed of all desert peoples, need to be met. The desire to weaken cultural differences and promote a kind of pan-Manding hegemony in Mali, a pan-Haoussa hegemony in Niger or a pan-Arab hegemony in Algeria and Libya is both backward and doomed. Reorganise the state TV companies so that TV programmes, especially news and current affairs, in local desert languages like Tamashek, Fulbe, Hassaniya and Songhoy are broadcast regularly. Allow local traditions of music and theatre equal access to the state-run airwaves. Use education to promote local language and culture.  Make every Malian, Nigerien, Algerian or Libyan feel that whatever language he or she speaks, it will never be a hindrance to their aspirations.

The doors of advancement up the ladder of state institutions, especially the army, must be fully opened to minorities like the Touareg. That might be a big ask in Mali, given the acute levels of suspicion and distrust of Touareg and Arabs that now exists in the south of the country. But such equality of opportunity is essential if Touareg and other desert minorities are to become peaceful citizens within larger multi-ethnic nations.

What about the frontiers? If we must accept that they’re not going to change or disappear, then they must be made less divisive and problematic for desert people. The late Colonel Muammar Khadafy might have been a power-hungry despot, but his dreams of creating a borderless Sahara, and issuing nomads with special ‘nomad’ passports were, in my view, visionary.

I myself dream of the day when the states of north Africa and the Sahel realise that it would be in their best interests to a create a free economic zone, based loosely on the model of the EU, that spans the entire Sahara from Lake Chad to the Atlantic. Only then will those absurdly arbitrary national borders cease to make a criminal out of an old grandmother who picks up 3 sacks of couscous in Tamanrasset, because they’re cheaper there than at home, and brings them back to Kidal or Agadez without paying the ridiculously high import duties demanded by the state.  As for drug and people smuggling, perhaps the answer to those problems lie in Europe rather than Africa.

The Sahara is a regional space and its problems require regional solutions.  In that respect, it’s the supra-national bodies that include countries from both the Maghreb and the Sahel that are key to future peace and prosperity in the region; bodies such as The Community of Sahel-Saharan States or CEN-SAD – another Khadafy invention – or the regional military committee known as CEMOC. Both are sadly quite toothless at the moment. But long-term, the importance of bodies such as these to the Touareg and other desert peoples will far outweigh that of ECOWAS or the African Union.

Meanwhile, Touareg society needs a revolution of its own. The conflict of 2012-13 has shown up the incompetence and geo-political naiveté of many Touareg leaders, especially those drawn from poorly educated and self-serving hereditary elites. Touareg society needs to become more mobile, more open to the promotion of genuine talent, more ready to learn about and engage with the rest of the world.

You’ll have noticed perhaps that I haven’t mentioned Islamist terrorism or Al Qaida once during this orgy of blue-sky thinking. That’s because neither are the cause of the Sahara’s ills but rather their symptoms. The religious tendencies of just a few ambitious Touareg leaders have managed to tarnish the image of an entire people in the eyes of the world. This is a tragedy which most Touareg I know are not prepared to easily forgive.

A young Touareg drives a 4×4 for Ansar ud-Dine, or hitches a ride as a cook, a guide or a foot soldier with a cell of jihadists or drug smugglers not out of a sense of conviction but rather a thirst for opportunity. The same thirst drove young Touareg men to find work in the French nuclear installations of In Ekker and Takormiasse in the 1960s or to travel clandestino to Libya and join Khadafy’s Islamic Regiment in the 1980s.

Touareg youth haven’t just been ‘radicalised’ by Al Qaida. They’ve been radicalised for generations by lack of opportunity and freedom. And opportunity works like an auction. The highest bidder usually wins. The nations of the Sahara need to bid high, not just in a financial sense, but in a social and political one, to keep their youth on track. That’s all there is to it.

The most prevalent state of mind I encounter when talking to Touareg friends and acquaintances is bafflement. How did it all come to this? What’s happening to our once peaceful desert home? Mali, Al Qaida, Algeria, France, America, China, they’re stronger than we are, that’s what they say. “It’s as if we’ve just woken up,” was how my musician friend from Tessalit once put it to me.

The world has to help the Touareg wake up and adapt their instinct for freedom to the realities of the modern world. It can be done. The Touareg question does have an answer. But it will require plenty of courage, investment and political skill. It’ll also need a season of deep reflection in those blues Saharan skies.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2013

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MUSIC

CULTURE

& CONFLICT

IN MALI

By Andy Morgan

AVAILABLE FROM:

FREEMUSE BOOKSTORE
iTUNES BOOKSTORE
AMAZON

“‘Andy takes you on a clear and considered journey through the complexities of modern Mali. A must read for all those interested in the culture of West Africa.” DAMON ALBARN.

“…one of the few positives to come out of the occupation of the northern two-thirds of Mali by armed jihadist groups in 2012 was the informed analysis of Andy Morgan. Now his writing on the crisis has grown into a book. His final chapter is required reading, a tour de force of both profound humanity and intellectual clarity.” NIGEL WILLIAMSON, Songlines. 5/5 Stars.

“Andy Morgan brings his skills as a journalist combined with deep insight gained as manager of Tinariwen to sieve through the shifting sands of Saharan culture in this fine book.”  IAN BIRRELL, Daily Mail & founder of Africa Express

“Does a wonderful job of not only detailing what happened during that awful period, but explaining why it did, and how it could easily happen again if things don’t change.” RICHARD MARCUS, Blogcritics.

“Essential reading for anyone who has been touched by Saharan music. It gives a clear and gripping picture of what it’s like to live through the chaos of a 21st century conflict…A really valuable piece of work.”  JUSTIN ADAMS, guitarist, UK

“Morgan’s book is an excellent examination of the contradictory forces in the “war on culture” currently led by Islamists in Mali. Music, Culture and Conflict in Mali represents an essential resource for anyone, scholar or layperson, seeking to grasp the Malian crisis, contemporary West African culture, and the impact of extremist movements on cultural production.”  ERIC J SCHMIDT, Ethnomusicology Review, USA.

“Andy Morgan has written a book about the Tuareg people that brings us up close with them in their moments of horror and disgust during the reign of the jihadists in northern Mali.” BARBARA WORLEY, Senior lecturer of Anthropology at University of Massachussetts, Boston, USA

“A wonderful, sad and powerful read! I’m emotionally spent! This goes far further than an examination of the effect on musical life in Mali. It reaches into all aspects of Malian life, history and future. Most powerful though are the personal stories. This is an important record.”  ANN MACKEIGAN, Executive Producer, CBC Music, Canada.

“The book is brilliant. Andy Morgan has solid experience, partly inside the music industry, not least as manager of Tinariwen. On top of that he’s a writer who knows his stuff backwards. It’s a treat to be introduced to the whole conflict in such a competent way and get first hand experience of what happens when the prophecy of The Doors is fulfilled.”  TORBEN HOLLEUFER, Gaffa magazine, Denmark.

“Many thanks for this magnificent work. Even though it’s in English, I’ve almost read it all, it’s so well written and accessible.”  OUSMANE DIARRA, author, Mali.

“An absolutely fantastic read and an invaluable primer on the volatile Malian situation of the last years. ” CHRIS ECKMAN, Musician and Producer (Dirt Music, Tamikrest), Slovenia.

READ THESE EXTRACTS:

“We don’t want Satan’s music!” – Scenes of musical life under Shari’a Law

Music in the red zone – The Festival in the Desert and the advance of Islamism in the north

“We have come here to teach you the true faith,” – Vandalism and destruction along the great fault line of the Sahel

Tisrawt – The epic tale of a theatre company from northern Mali

The post NEW BOOK – Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

The post MUSIC CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI (extract) – “We have come here to teach you the true faith” appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

[pp 41-45] The Festival in the Desert and the advance of Islamism in the north

The post MUSIC, CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI (extract) – Music in the red zone appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Touareg boy watching Camel Race, Tin Essako, Jan 2001

What do the Touareg want? Well, find me a person called ‘the Touareg’ and maybe he or she will tell us. You might as well find ‘the English’ or ‘the Japanese’ and ask them what they want while you’re at it.

A nation or people rarely if ever think as one. In the case of the Touareg, difference and disharmony is exacerbated by their vast desert habitat and dispersed nomadic lifestyle, both of which tend to foster an allegiance to blood and tribe that is stronger than their attachment to nation or ideology and militate against collective thought or action.

It can be argued that the very notion of a people called ‘The Touareg’ is an invention of 19^th century explorers and anthropologists, who adopted this supra-tribal and alien, i.e. Arab, collective noun to group together the Amazigh or Berber speaking nomadic tribes of the southern Sahara. Before ‘Touareg’ there were only different clans loosely affiliated by their language and cultural habits; Taitoq, Kel Ghela, Kel Ajjer, Kel Gress, Kel Fadey, Kel Ferwan, Ifoghas, Taghat Mellet, Iwellemeden, Chamanamas, Kel Antessar, Daoussahak…the list is long.

And all these clans were further sub-divided into sub-clans and sub-sub-clans. Within one of the six large confederations – the Kel Ahaggar, Kel Ajjer, Kel Aïr, Kel Adagh, Iwellemeden and Kel Taddemakkat – clans and sub-clans were organized into a complex hierarchy of nobles, vassals, warriors, artisans, marabout and slaves. This intricate social structure, which is well nigh-impossible for an outsider to grasp instinctively, underpins modern Touareg politics, despite the considerable erosion of the old clan system in the past century or so.

This historical backdrop, coupled with the fact that the Touareg share their living space with other ethnicities like the Arabs, Fulani and Songhoi, all of whom have their own layered clan structure, makes the Sahara one of the most complex places on earth for an outsider to understand.

Today, the Touareg are a made up of individuals with residual tribal allegiances, different levels of wealth and social position, different attitudes to religion, life and the world beyond their horizon.

Amongst the Touareg of northern Mali, you will find every shade of opinion from diehard nationalist through moderate Islamist, convinced Salafist and heartfelt loyalist – loyalist to the Republic of Mali that is. Some of the secular cadres and footsoldiers of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) still cling to their nationalist dream of complete independence from Mali. Others realize that forces beyond their control won’t them to realize this ultimate goal, and are pragmatically realigning the aims and objectives with a autonomy within the current borders of Mali, or some kind of federal solution.

The leaders of what remains of the hardline Islamist militia Ansar ud-Dine trust that Allah and his unbending law will put their world to rights, whilst maintaining links with out-an-out mafia-terrorist organisations such as Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) or the West African Movement for Oneness and Jihad (MUJAO). The ‘moderate’ Islamic Movement of Azawad (MIA), either for ideological or opportunistic reasons, most likely both, has severed all ties with Ansar ud-Dine, and is pursuing a more conciliatory line which nonetheless shares most of the MNLA’s autonomous ambitions. Loyalists like the Touareg militia leader Alhaji Ag Gamou, who has re-entered the fray in northern Mali after languishing for ten months in exile in Niger, keep faith with the Republic of Mali and its promise of advancement for Touareg social groups that were once firmly at the bottom of the tribal pile.

Disharmony and enmity between different Touareg groups and individuals has always existed. At independence in 1960, Mali, Algeria and Niger effectively co-opted the French strategy of divide and rule to deal with their Touareg populations, favoring and advancing ‘friendly’ tribal chiefs whilst curtailing the power of hostile ones. When seething tensions in the north east of Mali burst into open rebellion in 1963, the two sons of the amenokal or chief of the noble Ifoghas clan who ruled in northeastern Mali, were on opposite sides of the argument. Intallah Ag Attaher favoured making peace with the Malians and finding an accommodation within the new socialist republic, whilst his brother Zeyd Ag Attaher sided with the rebels and paid for it by spending over a decade in one of the remotest prisons on earth, up near the salt mines of Taodenni in the far north of Mali.

Perhaps, at this stage, it’s worth giving a brief answer to the most essential of questions: why did the Touareg of northeastern Mali rebel in the first place? Nina Wallet Intallou, ex-Malian politician and member of the MNLA’s executive council, proffers the simplest of answers; because the new nation was a mistake. What she means is that the new borders of Mali divided the Touareg of north eastern Mali from the Arab and Berber dominated desert lands further north, with which they had deep economic, cultural and historical ties, and lumped them together with the sedentary black people of the south, with whom they had less in common.

Many Touareg could not see why the Bambara, Soninké and Malinké people of the south should impose their language, culture and socialist ideas on them, especially as these ‘blacks’ had never actually vanquished the Touareg in battle, which, although painful, might at least have given their new overlords some kind of legitimacy. And, yes, racism was part of mix as well. Some northern Touareg and Arab leaders argued that they came from noble Cherifian lineages that went right back to the Prophet Mohammed and, as such, found the idea of being subservient to less ‘favoured’ southern blacks completely unacceptable.

Meanwhile, the new rulers of Mali, hundreds of kilometres down south in the capital Bamako, thought of the Touareg as belligerent, racist, feudal, arrogant and lazy. They couldn’t understand why these recalcitrant nomads refused to salute the new Malian flag and accept the government’s bright new socialist ideas, especially their modern ‘scientific’ collectivised farming methods or the secular school curriculum, all of which, the new leaders hoped, would drag the Touareg kicking and screaming from their outmoded, ‘medieval’ way of life and into the 20^th century.

It was, in short, a dire mismatch. The first rebellion of 1963 and its brutal suppression by a paranoid and inexperienced Malian army ensured that relations between the central government and their far-flung nomads in the north got off to the worst possible start. The bitterness generated by the conflict was deepened by the terrible droughts of 1972-3, during which up to 80% of the northern animal herds died and thousands of Touareg families were forced to flee the country in search of food and work. The corrupt misappropriation of aid by government officials during the crisis only made things worse.

From about 1985 right through to the signing of the National Pact in 1992, which signaled the official end of the great rebellion of 1990-1, the Touareg rebel movement was perhaps more unified under the leadership of the then firmly secular and nationalist Iyad Ag Ghali than it has ever been, before or since. But after the Pact was signed, the movement split along tribal lines into a chaotic alphabet soup of different militias, some of which ended up actually fighting each other in open combat. At the roots of this split was a jealousy and fear of the ruling Ifoghas tribe, to which Iyad Ag Ghali belonged. Other competing tribes like the Idnan and Taghat Mellet formed their own rival rebel group, in which Imghad or ‘vassal’ groups, think of them as the Touareg working classes (a gross over simplification, but I fear more complexity at this stage will simply loose you dear reader), slowly gained prominence and eventually ended up fighting a bitter internecine war with the Ifoghas.

As the 1990s progressed, the new democratically elected Malian government of President Amadou Toumani Touré, an ex-soldier who many Touareg accused of perpetrating atrocities against civilians during the rebellion, did little to honour the promises made in the National Pact and continued the policy of divide and rule in the north. Rebellion broke out again in 2006 and then again in January 2012. In fact, many Touareg argue that the north has been in one constant state of rebellion, with periods of greater or lesser open armed conflict, since 1963.

Nonetheless, the status of the Touareg within the Malian republic has undoubtedly changed over the years, whatever the ultra-nationalist Touareg might say. When Mali threw out the military dictatorship of Moussa Traore and brought in multi-party democracy in 1992, which heralded a period of great hope and social dynamism in the country, the total isolation that the Touareg of the far north east had known since independence was broken. Touareg leaders were given representation in national politics, and in 2002, for the first time ever, a Touareg was nominated prime minister. Even though many of the funds allocated to developing the north were embezzled, either by corrupt local leaders or central government officials, some of the money did get through and some schools, wells and clinics were built, although far too few in the eyes of those who continued to clamour for development and independence.

Touareg clans who had been subservient to the warrior-nobility in colonial times, such as the vassal Imghad or Bellah (‘slaves’) favoured the weakening of the old social hierarchies that being citizens of the Republic of Mali inevitably entailed. It gave them the chance to climb up the social ladder and achieve both wealth and status, a redrawing of social boundaries that often angered old clan bigwigs.  The Malian government also favoured a few talented Imghad men when it came to filling important vacancies in local administration or the army, much to the envy and fury of some belonging to ‘nobler’ tribes.

Furthermore, many younger Touareg, born after the years of drought and deprivation in the 1970s and 1980s were less driven by the notion that a future within Mali was impossible. They had, de facto, been Malian all their lives. Many had traveled to the south and learned at least a few words of Bambara. They listened to southern music and watched TV programmes made in Bamako. Whilst they still felt separate in many ways, that sense of alienation was weaker than it had been in their parents’ day.

But the bitterness and frustration remained and so did the marginalization. Touareg soldiers like Hassan Ag Fagaga, leader of the 2006 uprising, seethed at being denied promotion in the Malian army. Touaregs saw injustice in the fact that there was hardly any Tamashek music on national TV and absolutely no Tamashek language programmes. They bemoaned the lack of proper schools, clinics and roads in the north east. Furthermore, bitter old memories continued to die hard. Most of the Touareg rebel leaders in northern Mali are the “sons of ‘63”, in other words, men whose parents suffered great injustices in the uprising of 1963. Ghali Ag Babakar, the father of Islamist leader Iyad Ag Ghali, was killed in that uprising, as was the father of Mohammed Ag Najm, the military leader of the MNLA. Their hurt is still visceral and deep, as is their mistrust of the government in Bamako.

Islamism, however, is an entirely new element in this story. Until the mid 1990s, no Touareg leader had ever fought a rebellion in order to impose his brand of Islam on others by force. It was around 1995 that proselytising preachers from the Tablighi Jama’at, a peaceful Pakistani Muslim missionary organisation, started spreading their daw’ah or ‘summons’ throughout Mali. Iyad Ag Ghali, fascinated by their message, invited them up to Kidal in the northeast. He was disillusioned by the fractiousness of Touareg tribal politics and had more or less come to the conclusion that an independent Touareg state in northern Mali would never work. Moreover, although he doesn’t belong to the sub-clan of the Ifoghas from which the clan chief is chosen, he hoped that by associating himself with this new Islamism he would reinforce his prospects of becoming the first non-hereditary leader of the Ifoghas Touareg. No one doubted his supreme talents as a military and political leader, but Ag Ghaly lacked legitimacy as a religious figure. He figured that an association with the ‘alien’ Salafi doctrines of the Tablighi Jama’at and their logical ‘modern’ view of Islam might provide him with that legitimacy and allow him to contest the authority of Intallah Ag Attaher, the current aging leader of the Ifoghas clan.

Other figures in the Ifoghas nobility were also seduced by the ‘purist’ Salafi teachings of the Tablighi preachers, including Alghabass Ag Intalla, the current leader of the MIA, and the notorious war lord Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, who was killed in a ‘car crash’ in the summer of 2011. [NB Getting ‘killed in a car crash’ is often a desert euphemism for being assassinated in some way]. But in the end it only was Iyad Ag Ghali and a very close coterie of fellow Ifoghas who immersed themselves entirely in this new religious philosophy. Some, including Iyad, went so far as to further their studies at a Tablighi centre near the city of Lahore in Pakistan and at mosques in Bamako and Paris. He also became very strict and puritanical in his outlook and personal habits.

After Islamist terror groups from Algeria started to operate in northern Mali from about 2001 onwards, they soon made common cause with Iyad and a small but growing group of Touareg Salafists. Moreover, the GSPC, precursor of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), began to earn large sums from kidnapping, smuggling and money-laundering. Their presence and nefarious activities skewed the economy of northeastern Mali, such as it was, and realigned it around kidnapping, and the smuggling of drugs, arms, cigarettes, stolen cars. Tourism died a swift death, and, thanks more to desperation than religious fervour, some young Touareg accepted employment with the Islamists as drivers, informers, foot soldiers and runners.

In order to undermine the continuing Touareg insurgency, the governments of Mali and Algeria at best tolerated this presence and, at worst, actually encouraged it in clandestine ways. Confusing the cause of Touareg self-determination with that of Islamic militancy bought Mali kudos in the international community and enrolled their decades old secessionist problem into the much wider and better publicised global war on terror. France and the USA reacted to the creeping presence of Al Qaida-affiliates in northern Mali by boosting military aid, money that often disappeared into the pockets of corrupt politicians and generals. Eventually, the Touareg nationalist cause became synonymous with Islamism, Al Qaida, Osama Bin Laden and the global war on terror. The effect was a very neat emasculation of Touareg dreams and a deep tarnishing of the Touareg image in the eyes of the rest of the world.

With weapons stolen from Colonel Khadafy, a man who had always dampened Touareg ambitions whilst seeming to support their cause, the latest and most far reaching rebellion was launched a year ago. But it was hobbled from the outset by disunity. A large number of the Touareg soldiers who returned from Libya belonged to a tribe called the Idnan who had traditionally competed with the Ifoghas for dominance in the northeast. Iyad Ag Ghali demanded to become leader of the new rebellion but his advances were rejected. He also tried to impose his Salafi philosophy on the movement, but he was once again turned down. Smarting from this rejection he formed his own militia, Ansar ud-Dine, to which the best Ifoghas fighters soon swore allegiance. Blood proved thicker than water, or political philosophy for that matter, and furthermore, his coffers full of AQIM money, Iyad was able to pay and equip his army properly. His aim was not independence but Shari’ah law for all of Mali. He ‘lent’ his muscle to the MNLA but when the Malian army were defeated in May, he and his backers in AQIM hi-jacked the whole uprising and turned it into an Islamist takeover. The MNLA meanwhile, abandoned by most potential backers at home and abroad, limped along without the necessary funds.

Now, the Touareg nationalist cause has been as good as buried under a tempest of paranoia about “Al-Qaida linked terrorists” in the Sahel, a new front in the global war on terror and all the other pat phrases that the media habitually resort to in these circumstances.  Iyad Ag Ghaly and his fellow Ifoghas Salafists will obviously bear the brunt of the blame for this turn of affairs. His reputation in certain Touareg circles, once fairly glowing and venerable, is now devilish indeed.

France has piled in to stop the rot. Malians are understandably jubilant. But contrary to what the British Prime Minister David Cameron said in the House of Parliament recently, this isn’t primarily a global problem. It’s a very local one. Yes, the Algerian terrorists who run AQIM have sworn allegiance to the global Al Qaida franchise. Yes, they dream the same dreams and talk the same flowery language as jihadis in Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan. But the prime reasons behind the existence of radical armed terrorist groups in northern Mali are all to do with local problems; poverty, underdevelopment, corruption, crime, regional self-determination, ethnic aspiration etc etc.  To wade in with MIGs, tanks and boots on the ground without understanding the specific local problems facing people in northern Mali is to court eventual defeat and disaster.

Perhaps, on deep reflection, it’s possible to define a few hopes and dreams that unite most Touareg. I say ‘most’, because total agreement seems virtually impossible. A visceral attachment to their earth, to the beauty, pristine wildness, simplicity and space of their desert home seems to be almost universal. So is the deep nostalgia or assouf felt by most Touareg when they’re absent from it, either by compulsion or of their own free will. This feeling alone accounts for the emotional power of 90% of all Touareg music, including that of world famous Touareg guitar groups like Tinariwen, Tamikrest and Terakaft.

Most Touareg want to see this natural beauty, this freedom of the wide open spaces preserved and with it the nomadic pastoralism that has been practised there for millennia. Then again, there are some, a few, that consider nomadism to have no future at all and who urge their fellow Touareg to accept the sedentary life as the only route to a modern and sustainable future.

Allied to nature and nomadism is the Touareg’s unique Berber culture, especially their language, which is called Tamashek and their alphabet, the oldest in the world to have been kept in continuous use, which is called Tifinagh. Keeping Tamashek alive has been a major motivation behind the Touareg rebellions of the past, spurring demands for Tamashek education and Tamashek speaking television channels

Then there are the other mainstays of Touareg culture that most Touareg treasure. Among them are music, poetry, jewellery-making, leather-working, story-telling, traditional healing, camel breeding and more. But, once again, this cultural pride isn’t felt by all Touareg. A tiny ‘lunatic’ fringe of Salafi Touareg consider their Berber culture to be backward and irrelevant in the modern world, a folksy throw-back kept alive by meddling western anthropologists. They would prefer their people to adopt Arabic, the language of the Qu’ran and of the wider Muslim community. With that they would welcome a greater Arabisation of the Touareg. They deem certain other aspects of Touareg culture, especially music and dance, to be licentious and ungodly and they object to the relative freedom and social power that Touareg women enjoy. They also revile the old ‘backward’ Sufi traditions of Islam that most Touareg adhere to.It’s important to stress however that these Salafi attitudes are shared by a small minority of Touareg. Unfortunately, that minority includes a few of the most powerful men in Touareg society, including Iyad Ag Ghali.

Lastly, almost all Touareg bemoan the dearth of social and economic development in their homeland since the end of colonialism. They would like to see more schools, more health clinics, more wells, better roads, cheaper petrol, cheaper food, better distribution of goods, less criminality, more peace and stability. When a Touareg musician sings that his desert is dying of thirst, this is what he means. Without development, the desert is going nowhere.

These then are the dreams that most Touareg share. It’s the conflicting views on how to make those dreams come true that divide them. The nationalists believe that Mali can no longer be trusted to serve the best interests of the Touareg. They argue that the Touareg and other northern ethnic groups, especially the Arabs, will forever be marginalised and discriminated against within a Malian state. Only independence can guarantee a future for the Touareg people and their culture. The MNLA have also been at pains to prove that this opinion is shared by all the major ethnic groups in the north – Touareg, Arab, Songhoi, Fulani, Bozo etc. Mostly however, it’s only Touareg and Arabs who buy into it in large numbers. The nationalists also look outwards and favour alliances with foreign powers and international institutions such as the UN and the EU, as long as they further the cause.

The hardline Islamists believe that borders only serve to divide up the great Muslim community or ‘ummah’ and will eventually lead to greater human suffering and evil. For them, a simple and strict adherence to the word of God and to his law is all the Touareg and the greater Malian nation need in order to eradicate the vices introduced from the west and re-establish a safe, clean and prosperous state of affairs in the Sahel. They distrust the west of course, and if help is needed, prefer to consider local resources or appeal to other Muslim states, especially those in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia or Qatar, for support. Iyad Ag Ghali himself is especially adamant that Muslims should help each other and not go running cap in hand to infidels. That is why he chose to make a pact with Al Qaida and accept their ‘dirty’ money in his fight to create an Islamic Republic in the north of Mali, even though he doesn’t necessarily share AQIM’s cold hatred of all things non-Muslim or their propensity to target innocent people. More moderate Islamists like Alghabass Ag Intalla have rejected this alliance with the ‘narco-terrorists’ and aligned themselves with MNLA whilst maintaining their insistence that the future autonomous region of Azawad should essentially be founded on Islamic principles, in legal, political and moral terms at least.

It must be said that what motivates Touareg Islamist leaders like Iyad Ag Ghali and what spurs young Touareg men to join his cause isn’t necessarily the same. For the latter, the promise of safety within a large, powerful and well-armed group coupled with the prospect of good equipment and regular salary are major attractions. Furthermore, for a young man who has known only poverty, unemployment and hopelessness is recent years, a job and concomitant status with Ansar ud-Dine can seem bright and attractive.  The fact that Ansar ud-Dine has seem its ranks heavily depleted almost overnight following the French intervention is proof of the opportunistic motives of many of its former footsoldiers.

Some have even claimed, probably too charitably, that Iyad Ag Ghali created Ansar ud-Dine in order to given young Touareg a chance to express what he believed to be their natural Islamic identity whilst avoiding the compromise of joining the Arab dominated Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.  In other words Ansar ud-Dine offered young Touareg the opportunity to be both genuine Islamists whilst preserving their essential Targuité or Touaregness.

Lastly, there are the loyalists who prefer to see Mali remain intact. They believe that a Touareg dominated state in the north is an impossibility. The Touareg are simply too internally divided, they say, too inexperienced in terms of administration and statesmanship and too dominated by self-serving clan elites to make an independent state viable. They’ll probably admit that Mali is far from perfect, but better to build a future within its democratic and republican confines than accept the possibility of an autocratic ruler in the north, who needs must will inevitably resort to repression and violence in order to keep all the disparate tribal and ethnic tensions in an independent Azawad at bay.

Moreover, what would an independent Azawad actually live on. Gold? Oil? Phosphates? Livestock? Tourism? The economic life of the Sahara is simply too fragile, and too dependent on more urban societies to the south and north to exist independently. Lastly and most importantly, Azawad is an impossibility simply because Algeria would never allow it.

This loyalism is common not only among the Imghad clans of the far north east, but among other Touareg tribes who have had a less tortured relationship with Bamako in the past than that of the Ifoghas. These include the giant Iwellemeden confederation of the Menaka area, the Kel Antessar of Timbuktu and Goundam and the Chamanamas of the Gao region.  But then again, within all those groups, the full range of opinions can still be found.

So what do the Touareg want?  Impossible to say in one snappy soundbite. Except perhaps, a good drenching of rain to soak the parched earth every summer.  But that, only the Almighty can provide.

Andy Morgan (c) 2013

First published in Al Jazeera English Online eMagazine.  Download it from iTunes!

The post What do the Touareg want? appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar aka Laouaar aka Monsieur Marlboro aka One Eyed Jack

The following is an extract from my forthcoming book Kel Tinariwen – A Saharan Odyssey. The context is a visit I made to Tamanrasset in southern Algeria in January 2010, where I stayed with Eyadou Ag Leche, the bassist of Tinariwen. Obviously, the story of AQIM has evolved substantially since then but for present purposes I’ve decided to keep the context intact and limit this extract to the period 1990-2007.  I made no reference to subsequent events such as the Touareg uprising of January 2012, the alliance of Touareg Islamist leader Iyad Ag Ghali with AQIM, the Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 or Belmokhtar’s dramatic hostage grab at the In Amenas oil refinery in January 2013.  I will be bringing the story up to date before publication, but in the meantime, I hope this offers some useful background today’s dramatic headlines…

Out in the yard of Eyadou’s house, we talked about the Great Game that had gripped the southern Sahara. We asked all the usual questions in the eager hope that Eyadou might be able to throw some light on them. Who exactly are Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb?  Why are they allowed to operate in northern eastern Mali? Why has the Adagh, the home of Tinariwen and their ancestors, become a bolt-hole for terrorists and their hostages?  Are AQIM involved in the drug trafficking trade?  Do they have links with the Touareg in the area?  Or with local Arabs?  Are they an invention of the Algerian secret services?  Are they in cahoots with the Malian government?  Is the President of Mali involved in drug trafficking? How come a Boeing 727 can land in the desert, unload up to ten tonnes of coke into a waiting convoy of 4x4s and then get torched without the local authorities intervening or even raising the alarm? Many questions spiralled in and out of each other like eddies of sand.  It was as if our vision of the whole problem ended at the tip of our noses.

Eyadou didn’t know the answers either. Not many people know the answers, and those who do aren’t the type to blithely spill the beans over a good lunch. Terrorist emirs, Malian secret service operatives, corrupt local politicians, Saharan drug barons, Algerian generals, politicians in Bamako, Touareg rebel leaders in Kidal, arms dealers from Tamanrasset and Timbuktu, Mauritanian customs chiefs, none of them are the most garrulous conversationalists and raconteurs, especially if they happen to be talking to a western journalist who’s asking too many questions.

There are facts about Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) that are reassuringly hard and verifiable. The organisation exists. It’s run by Algerian Arabs. It’s made a home from home in the north east of Mali, on Tinariwen’s native earth. It earns millions and millions of euros from kidnapping westerners. No one knows exactly how much. Every now and then it chops the head off one of its victims. All in the name of Allah.

But beyond that solid core of certainties floats a penumbra of intrigue and supposition, a mist of conspiracy theorising that turns AQIM into a mystery with the power to obsess, like the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster or the grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas. And beneath all that speculative hot air, the people of the deserts, the Kel Tinariwen, languish in misery. Many of them live the truth, a daily gritty unglamorous truth that armchair theorists and analysts cannot know. But most live without knowing the geopolitical mechanisms behind that truth. They know their desert is dying. They know that rain is rarer than it was, that the government 1,500km away in Bamako has abandoned them, that the basics of civilization – schools, clinics, sustainable energy, a functioning economy, welfare – are absent from their lives, and that tourism has been killed by foreigners, i.e Algerian Arabs, in the name of Islam.  But why?

In the early 1990s, the small cabal of army generals who had wielded real power in Algeria since independence found themselves unpopular at home and isolated abroad. The anger and resentment of ordinary Algerians against these shady strong men and their party, the FLN, the only party in this one party state, had reached breaking point by the middle of the 1980s. Inspired by the Berber Spring of 1982, feelings exploded into a inflammable display of people power in October 1988. This popular uprising, an ‘Arab spring’ un-fêted and largely ignored by the rest of the world, lead directly to Algeria’s first free multi-party democratic elections in 1991. The first round of the ballot, held in late December 1991, gave an unassailable lead to an Islamist party called the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamic du Salud or FIS in French). But the generals decided that they couldn’t risk handing power to a party that considered democracy itself to be an unIslamic western apostasy. Islamist dogma held that power can only come from God, not the people, and that democracy itself is therefore ungodly.   The general’s dogma held that power was theirs, by right and privilege. The two dogmas were incompatible and so the generals cancelled the second round of voting, which was due to be held in late January 1992.

This spectacular abortion of the democratic process soiled the image of the Algerian leadership in the eyes of western democracies such as France and the USA. Back home, its effect was catastrophic. Fury cooked the nation’s heart. Some Algerians came to the conclusion that the generals, the ruling FLN and their entire rotten system of power had to be annihilated by any means necessary. Anyone with a stake in that system would have to be punished for robbing the nation of its dignity and its freedom. The generals tried to appease the popular ire by importing a new leader in the shape of Mohammed Boudiaf, a hero of the struggle for independence who had been exiled to Morocco for opposing President Ben Bella in the early 1960s. They installed him as temporary President in January 1991 but the move turned out to offer little more than a flicker of light in a storm of emotion that refused to abate. Boudiaf was assassinated six months later by a sub-lieutenant who belonged to an elite security unit affiliated to the Algerian secret services.

Gradually, throughout 1991, the hope that the Algerian people had placed in democracy mutated into gross civil disobedience, bloodshed and guerrilla war. The more radical elements in the FIS took to the hills and formed a number of different Islamist militias who vowed to continue their struggle for an Islamic state by violent means. Most of these home grown jihadists were clear that their enemies were the state, the army and the police. They considered the targeting of civilians to be haram, a sin. Hearts soon hardened however, and vengeance grew colder, a process that accelerated with the return of Algerian men who had fought with the mujahedeen against the Russian army in Afghanistan during the 1980s and others who went there to do a stint in the new Islamist training camps in the 1990s. Collectively, these ‘pros’ were known as Les Afghans and they were responsible for introducing ever more lethal guerrilla tactics as the decade went on.

The Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armée or GIA) was formed by one of these Afghans, a man called Mansour Meliani, in the summer of 1992 and it soon became the most feared and powerful terror organisation in the country. It vowed death to all heretics and unbelievers, who, by their definition, meant not only the government, the army and the police but also journalists, writers, artists, musicians, academics, commentators, intellectuals, opposition politicians and countless entirely innocent civilians. In their polarised vision of the world, almost the entire Algerian population was guilty of complacency and ‘co-operation’ with the government, and thus were legitimate targets for their bullets and bombs. Eminent cultural figures like the rai singer Cheb Hasni and the writer Tahar Djaout were killed by GIA mujahedeen.

The FIS soon tried to alienate themselves from the GIA by forming their own Islamic Salvation Army (Armée Islamique du Salut – AIS) in order to conduct jihad in what they considered to be the ‘proper’ and ‘moral’ way. The GIA then became more bent on fighting the FIS, the AIS, and the old Islamist militia, the Armed Islamic Movement (Movement Islamique Armée – MIA), than the Algerian army or police. The political intrigue and blood-letting within the jihadi movement became murderous and complex. By the end of 1994, the GIA was under the command of the bloodthirsty Djamel Zitouni, whose ambition was to refocus some of the GIA’s brutal power directly on France, Algeria’s hated ex-colonial overlord. He masterminded the highjacking of Air France Flight 8689 in Algiers on Christmas Day 1994, intending to fly it into the Eiffel Tower. He also sent mujahedeen to plant bombs on the Paris Metro, killing many innocent civilians. But the suffering of foreigners was nothing compared to that of Algerians themselves.

After Zitouni was killed by a splinter group in 1996, the GIA was taken over by Antar Zouabri, a man with an even greater thirst for innocent blood. He espoused the notion that the entire Algeria population were guilty of heretical behaviour, by their docility, their moral depravity and their aspiration to democracy. Religious guidance was sought from the Jordanian preacher and jurist Abou Qatada, then based in London, who issued a legal judgement or fatwa in 1995 which claimed that the killing of innocent women and children was justified if they had converted from Islam or were ‘apostates’.  Abou Qatada and the GIA espoused the extreme Kharijite doctrine of takfir, whereby entire groups or populations of Muslims are declared to be unbelievers, sinners and apostates and therefore condemnable to death under Shari’a law. This was the judgement which lead to the killing of over 100,000 innocent Algerians. Even though, by 1997, the GIA had begun to fall apart under the weight of its own internal cat-fighting and frequent purges, the carnage it perpetrated during Algeria’s dirty war of the 1990s has been well documented and lamented. By the middle of the decade, not only the level of violence, but its sheer inventiveness and depravity had plumbed unimaginable depths.

GIA recruitment policies were famously lax, and the organisation was soon burdened not only with large number of petty criminals turned opportunistic jihadists, but also by undercover government agents. The theory soon began to emerge that early in their campaign of terror, armed Islamic groups, especially the GIA, had been infiltrated the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), aka La Sécurité Militaire (SM), aka the Algerian secret services. The general whisper was that shadowy forces in the government were in fact responsible for instigating some of the inhuman acts outwardly committed in the name of jihad. The stench of conspiracy was reinforced by the testimony of former DRS agents who ‘turned’ and sought asylum abroad, where they revealed some of dark machinery of power that operated within Algeria. The finger was often pointed at the head of the Algerian secret services, General Mohammed Mediène, aka ‘Tewfik’, one of the most secretive figures in the Algerian military high-command, and, together with General Smain Lamari, the real power in Algeria.

Whether or not their struggle was partly puppeteered from above, by 1997 many GIA foot soldiers, and some cadres too, were tired and dismayed with the brutality that their leaders, especially Antar Zouabri, seemed happy to continue inflicting on a bruised and battered Algeria. One of these GIA leaders, a former army paratrooper and commander of the GIA’s eastern sector, Hassan Hattab aka Abou Hamza, broke away with other dissidents and announced the formation of a new organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (Groupe Salafist pour le Predication et le Combat – GSPC), in March 1999. Hattab defined the group’s enemy strictly and narrowly as the army and the state. Killing innocent civilians was forbidden. This new direction attracted thousands of defectors from both the GIA and the AIS, and GSPC numbers soon swelled to over 3,000 fighters. Osama Bid Laden was alleged to have given the project his blessing. GIA tactics had proved too extreme even for the don of global jihad.

The horror in Algeria had become overwhelming. The generals and the FLN government confessed to have realised that military victory against the insurgents was an impossibility and a more conciliatory approach was required. Between 1995 and 1998, President Lamine Zeroual issued numerous decrees of clemency and pardon which persuaded over 4000 Islamist fighters to lay down their arms. In April 1999, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a 62 year-old FLN cadre who had the backing of the army, was elected President on a platform of national reconciliation. A law known as the Concorde Civile was passed in September 1999, offering a general amnesty that persuaded many more GIA grunts to come in from the cold. Further pardons were granted in 2005 by The Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation which was approved by the people in a referendum. The nation was sick of violence and a large proportion of the Islamist movement began to turn away from Semtex and the Kalash’ towards the ballot box and other forms of non-violent opposition.

Only the GIA and GSPC spurned all peaceful overtures and vowed to keep on fighting until their dream of an Islamic caliphate in Algeria became a reality. But by the turn of the millennium, a combination of battle fatigue, conciliatory government policies and successful army and police operations against Islamist militias was slowly re-establishing law and order in the north of Algeria. The GSPC decided to seek new battlefields in areas where the government’s grip was still limp. They also wanted to implement a new ‘internationalist’ agenda, and bring their movement in line with the objectives of the global jihad. Representatives of the GSPC had travelled to Pakistan in 1998 to attend a meeting organised by Osama Bin Laden in an attempt to unite disparate groups of mujahedeen around the world into one global Islamist front. The predominant doctrines that united these groups were Salafism and Wahabbism.

The Salafists preach a return to the pure and unsullied moral principles of the as-Saaleh as-Salaf, the ‘righteous originators’, those first Muslims whose life and moral rectitude is admired and venerated by modern adepts. It’s a kind of religious nostalgia that looks back to what it imagines was a complete, unified and morally clean doctrine for living that held sway in the years immediately following the death of the Prophet but had since been corrupted and tarnished. Some claim that Salafism is actually a rather modern concept cobbled together by scholars in the Asian subcontinent at the end of the 19th century to free young Muslim minds from the chains of colonialism and bind them to a strict interpretation and application of the Qu’ran and hadith, or body of Muslim law. Since then, ‘Salafis’ has become something of a catch-all adjective used to describe any Muslim who vows to impose Sharia law and an unadulaterated Islamic way of life on an unwilling society by peaceful, or, if necessary, violent means.

An early proselytiser for a return the pure life of the as-Salaf was Mohammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century Arabian preacher who wrote the highly influential Kitab at-Tawhid or ‘Book of Oneness’. His ideas became entrenched in the Arabian peninsula and were adopted by the House of Saud in the early 20th century. Despite their love of material excess and their warm relationship with the USA, the Saudi royal family and princes from Qatar and other Arabian principalities have been among the chief funders of Salafism and Wahabbism throughout the world. Their money has helped to build mosques and madrassas in North and West Africa and fund the activities of Salafists. The GSPC were Salafists through and through, and they began to believe that they would be better off signing up to a worldwide movement of similarly minded mujahedeen, rather than continuing to fight their corner in Algeria alone.

New leaders emerged to challenge Hattab’s tenure as the overall emir or leader of the GSPC, especially after Hattab had tried to distance the movement from Al Qaida and its brazen violence against civilians following the 11th September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Furthermore, many men in the movement considered Hattab to be a weak leader, lacking in total commitment and unable to produce sufficiently horrifying and headline spawning results. Most prominent among these new dissenters were three men; Abdelmalek Droukdel aka Abu Mousad Abdel Wadoud, a graduate in mathematics and one of the GSPC’s most talented bomb makers, Nabil Sahraoui aka Mustapha Abou Ibrahim, one of the most admired and revered militia leaders in the GSPC, and Amari Saïfi aka Abou Haidara aka Abderrazak El Para.

The debate raged around the question whether the GSPC should be fighting a battle for the soul of Algeria or the soul of the entire world. In other words, were the Algerian generals the ultimate target, or was it America, Israel and ikufar or unbelievers and apostates throughout the globe. Droukdel, Sahraoui and Saïfi wanted the organisation to be part of a global jihad, modelled on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Hattab however still thought of the FLN and the Algerian state as the main enemy. In the end, the internationalists won the argument. Hassan Hattab was forced to resign and Nabil Sahraoui, “a towering minaret and courageous hero” according to the GSPC website, became the new emir in August 2003. In May 2004 he released a communiqué entitled “The War on Foreigners”, in which he vowed vengeance against Zionists, crusaders and the apostate regimes of the Arabo-islamic world. He also announced a plan to start attacking foreigners on Algerian soil. Less than a month later, he died in a hail of bullets near Akfadou in the Kabyle mountains. The copiously bearded Abdelmalek Droukdel took his place as the new emir.

A key matchmaker in the looming nuptials between the GSPC and Al Qaida was a Yemenite called Abdel Wahid Ahmed Alouane, aka Abou Mohammed al Yemeni, who visited the GSPC on many occasions in the early years of the new millennium as Bin Laden’s special envoy in North Africa. Following the US invasion in 2003, Bin Laden knew that Afghanistan’s days as the ideal training ground for the global mujahedeen were numbered. Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman az-Zawahiri, were looking for another part of world in which to base their operations. The Sahara seemed to offer a number of advantages as a theatre for jihad; weak government control, remote hiding places, porous borders, corrupt officials already tainted by their involvement in smuggling, a poor and therefore pliable population and a thousand unwatched desert tracks on which to flee beyond the reach of the security forces. It was also the ideal pad from which to further the Al Qaida project in Africa, a continent which Bin Laden deemed most propitious for his hardline vision of the future.

After a few particularly bloody seasons, the GSPC leadership began to accept that they weren’t exactly winning hearts and minds in Algeria’s north. Their tactics were simply too brutal, and too damaging to the human and material capital of the country. The support of the populace, so essential to any guerrilla insurgency, was increasingly sporadic and begrudging. Moving south and targeting foreigners seemed to be a wise diversionary tactic, which would hopefully ease the bruised sensibilities of ordinary Algerians in the north and tap in their deep-seated resentment against France in particular and whites in general, who had been bogeymen in the general conscious ever since the debasement of the colonial era and the brutality of the war of independence.

The two GSPC emirs in charge of Algeria’s southern and eastern sectors at the turn of the millennium, Abderrazak El Para and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, had already been active in the Sahara and Sahel for a few years. By ‘active’ it should be understood that the pair indulged in a range of activities, not all of which were inspired by the divine call to jihad. A large part of their time was spent smuggling. Belmokhtar was an archetypal Saharan smuggler and had been since his early teens.

Terrorism and insurgency, which involves feeding and arming many hundreds of full-time fighters, is an expensive business that needs a constant supply of black cash. During the 1990s it was relatively easy to raise the necessary funds by appealing to Islamist pockets worldwide. In the places like Saudi Arab and Qatar, those pockets were extremely deep. Apart from large donations from Middle Eastern princes, emirs and business, contributions were sought from the faithful in mosques, madrassas, universities, clubs and societies from Paris to Peshawar and Detroit to Djakarta. A complex network of Islamic charities, associations and banks was set up to channel these funds from the donors to the mujahedeen in far-flung parts of the world. However, after 9/11, the ease with which this money could fly backwards and forwards across the globe was severely diminished by new laws prohibiting the funding of terror.  Other means of generating cash needed to be found.

The GSPC involved themselves in the more lucrative end of the trans-Saharan smuggling game, namely cigarettes, second hand cars, illicit petrol, weapons, illegal migrants and drugs. Arms purchased in Northern Mali, Libya, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and countries further afield, were used to fight jihad or secessionist rebellions in Algeria and Mali. There was no dearth of stock. Small weaponry, from hand guns to automatic rifles and RPGs, often of Russian and East European manufacture, had flooded into West Africa during many forgotten wars of the previous decade. Tobacco, a favourite cash cow of armed insurgencies around the world, was a good earner. Marlboro cigarettes or other pirated brands could be snapped up cheap in the ports of West Africa, especially Lomé and Cotonou, and then smuggled north through the desert to Algeria’s mediterranean coast and on into Europe. The stringent duties payable in many north African and European countries on legally imported cigarettes made the black-market trade very profitable.

Unemployment, corruption and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa were also the root causes for an ever more lucrative trade in people. Poor African migrants on an epic search for a better life were loaded up onto trucks on the southern perimeter of the Sahara and transported north by people traffickers before being dumped and left to their own devices in the coastal towns of Algeria, Morocco and Libya. Finally there were drugs. Hashish was purchased from growers in the Rif mountains of Morocco and carried south through Mauritania and Mali, and then west up through Niger, Egypt, the Middle East and up into Europe via Turkey and Balkans. Cocaine was also beginning to trickle into the desert, but not yet in the quantities that were later to shock the world.

Smuggling has been around in the southern Sahara for as long as trans-Saharan caravan trading has existed, in other words, since time immemorial. The transport of goods from north to south across the Sahara and vice versa is the prerogative of desert people, most notably the Arabs, or Moors, and the Touareg. Members of certain families and clans are caravan traders almost by birthright, and the desert road is in their blood. Nice distinctions between the legality and illegality of different types of cargo matter less to these traders than to the distant governments under whose authority they are supposed to operate. After all, one man’s legitimate desert caravan is another man’s train of contraband. Dates, palm oil, ostrich feathers, ivory, salt, slaves, gold, cars, Marlboro cigarettes, ghetto blasters, transistor radios, fake Rolex watches, cooking oil, pasta, powdered milk, sugar, jeans, diesel, petrol, hashish, second hand cars, illegal migrants, weapons, cocaine; whatever the cargo, it’s always just been a question of supplying demand and earning a living. Without caravanning and smuggling, the Saharan economy, such as it is, would have collapsed long ago.

In bygone colonial and pre-colonial times, trans-Saharan trading was often dominated by large Arab families and clans, especially the Chaambi from the Tidikelt, the Ahl Azzi of the Touat, the M’zabi of the Ghardaia region, the Berabiche clans who lived in the deserts north of Timbuktu and the Kounta who lived on the eastern shores of the Niger bend, north of Gao. These families would trade across the desert with each other, turning the Sahara into one unified economic, social and cultural space. Their activity created links and ties that have survived and gradually mutated into the trading or smuggling networks of today. As British anthropologist Judith Scheele’s superb work on the subject, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (African Studies) so ably explains, the Sahara works on quite different economic and spatial principles than many other parts of the world. A trader in Adrar in the Touat might have closer family and clan ties with people in Timbuktu or Gao that with his immediate neighbours. Not only trade goods, but politics, religion, tribal loyalty, power and influence are determined by those ties, making the Sahara one of the most complex regions in the world to understand. This economic and social unity of the Saharan space also explains why the borders imposed on the region at the end of the colonial era were so problematic to livelihoods and connections and so often despised by desert people.

As the 19th century drew to a close, there was a large influx of Arabs from Mauritania into the deserts north of Gao, many of whom came to fight for the Kounta in its wars against the most powerful Touareg confederation at that time; the Iwellemeden. Many of these Mauritanian Arabs settled in the area and formed a distinct sub-tribe known as the Tilemsi Arabs, who became vassals of the Kounta and paid tribute to them. The descendants of these Tilemsi Arabs have become successful businessmen, smugglers and livestock herders, whose networks stretch far north and west into Algeria and Mauritania. In recent decades, smuggling hasn’t just been the get-rich-quick solution for the ‘lower class’ Arabs of the Tilemsi and Timbuktu regions, it has also been a means of securing political, social and tribal independence from their former masters. This process has been accompanied by deep and often severe social strain and political upheaval.

Nowadays Algeria, with its soft currency and its strictly controlled or ‘closed’ import and export policy, is a paradise for smugglers. Travel through Morocco and everyone wants to sell you something. Travel through Algeria and everyone wants to buy something from you. The Algerian state imposes ludicrous restrictions on the movement of basic food stuffs and livestock across its southern borders. Only second-rate and barely edible dates seem to be allowed through without hindrance. And yet, almost everything that goes into peoples’ bellies in Kidal and Gao has been smuggled into Mali from Algeria, whether it’s pasta, sugar, powdered-milk, flour or couscous. And the flow south of other essentials, including petrol, is constant and unstoppable. In such an environment, black economies thrive and provide ample opportunities to make, and loose, fortunes.

But smuggling isn’t only about money. It provides an answer to the soulful yearnings of the desert man. It’s a way of regaining pride, of pitting your wits, your courage and your physical strength against nature and against the oppressive control of distant States. It’s a way of becoming a young man of means, fit to marry one or even more wives from ‘good’ families, an asset to family and tribe, a ‘true Arab’ who feels pride in his heart. The smuggling road leads to independence and freedom, both of the pocket and the spirit. It allows a young Arab or Touareg to feel good about himself and his world once again, after decades of drought, of degradation, of rebellion against the state, of social change and collapse. Speeding across the lunar flatness of the Tanezrouft, behind the wheel of a powerful boulboul or Toyota Landcruiser HG60, at 120 kmph, with money in the pocket, payload in the back and eyes firmly fixed on the horizon, is a dream so much more powerful than anything else the Sahara can offer a 16 year old youth. It beats sitting around in some distant desert villages, penniless, wifeless, hopeless. It’s a dream of freedom.

Neither the GSPC, nor the GIA before them, actually controlled the trans-Saharan smuggling rackets. The Saharan emirs or militia leaders often came from a smuggling background and were well versed in the ways and wiles of the trade.  But the notorious smuggling dons of the 80s and 90s, men like the drug lord Ahmed Zendjabil aka El Chelfaoui aka The Pablo Escobar of Algeria or Tamanrasset’s smuggling lynchpin Hadj Bettou, weren’t necessarily Islamists. They were simply businessmen and mafia godfathers with enormous power. Hadj Bettou is suspected by many to have instigated the successful plan to assassinate the interim President Mohammed Boudiaf in 1992. Boudiaf vowed to ‘clean up’ Algeria in general, and Tamanrasset in particular.  Big mistake.

Terrorists and traffickers the world over co-exist in the same murky underworld. In the Sahara, family, clan and tribal links often bind together the smuggler, the Islamist mujahid and the agent of the State – whether a policeman, a customs official or an army officer – in one large and geographically far flung network of self-interest and self-preservation. It’s not that the presence of the state is necessarily weak in the distant border areas of southern Algeria and northern Mali, it’s just that what state officials do operate there are often more interested in making sure that in the daily struggle for security and advancement, the interests of their family and their clan aren’t overlooked.

If drug lord or people smuggler wants to transport his cargo through an area controlled by Islamists, then a brown envelope stuffed with protection money is handed over. If some impoverished army officer at the barracks in Tamanrasset or Timbuktu needs to earn a little extra on the side by selling a few surplus semi-automatic weapons and rounds of ammunition then he can just call the man from the GSPC. If a mafia boss wants to secure a more long term advantage then he can fund an Islamist group on a regular basis, just to keep things clean and stable.  That’s how the cogs of underworld turn. Other examples of insurgency and crime sharing different sides of the same coin are plentiful: The Taliban in Afghanistan and the heroine trade, Colombia’s FARC and cocaine, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and precious gems or rare wood, the IRA or ETA and narcotics or weapons, the Kurdish PKK and narcotics…the list goes on. What’s happening in the Sahara fits a well established global pattern.

Terrorism and smuggling meet in the figure of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, aka Khaled Abou El Abassa, aka Laaouar, ‘the one-eyed’, who is something of a Bin Laden, Scarlet Pimpernel and Al Capone all rolled into one; a desert boy, born and bred in Ghardaia, Algeria, who was “seduced”, in his own words, by jihad and especially by the writings and recordings of the Palestinian Abdallah Azzam. In his teenage years he travelled to Afghanistan to receive training in Al Qaida camps near the city of Jalalabad and it was in Afghanistan, so he claims, that a piece of Russian shrapnel robbed him of an eye. Belmokhtar returned home in the early 1990s and became the Mr Big Stuff of southern Algeria’s smuggling rackets, forging strong links with arms, drugs and people smugglers and befriending various Touareg and Berabiche tribal leaders in the process. He even married one, or possibly several Berabiche Arab girls from Timbuktu and once declared that he would like to ‘retire’ to northern Mali when his hustling days are over. He also joined the GIA soon after its inception and then left with Hattab to become part of the GSPC in 1999.

By the turn of the millennium, Belmokhtar had risen up the ranks to become the GSPC’s emir of zone 9, the southern beat that comprised most of Algeria grand sud, the open southern deserts so enticing to the inveterate criminal smuggler. In the early naughties he collaborated with Abderrazak El Para, then the emir of zone 5, the eastern zone, on refocussing GSPC operations further south, but the pair soon fell out, jealous of each others’ power. Whereas El Para ventured into ill-advised waters by seeking to buy arms in Chad and eventually got himself caught and extradited back to Algeria, Belmokhtar, with unfailing shrewdness of judgement, has evaded capture for more than two decades. The French security services call him l’inssaisisable, the ‘uncatchable’. Whilst his current rival at the top of AQIM’s Saharan hierarchy, Abou Zeid, is reviled for his brute cruelty and appetite for chopping the heads off his kidnap victims, Sahara watchers often regard the one-eyed Belmokhtar aka Monsieur Marlboro with a grudging respect, recognising his relative restraint in the treatment of hostages and his nose for a good deal. Many are convinced he’s only in it for the money and always has been. “Belmokhtar will kidnap, rob or smuggle anything for anyone,” a silver-haired Saharanist once said to me, “so long as the price is right.”

In 2003, the GSPC katiba or ‘militia’ lead by Amari Saïfi aka Abderrazak El Para kidnapped thirty two German, Swiss, Austrian and Dutch tourists in southern Algeria. This spectacular coup launched Islamic terrorism in the southern Sahara, an area that had hitherto been spared the worst excesses of Algeria’s horror. El Para, as his nickname implies, was a one time para-commando and captain of special forces in the Algerian army who had trained with US Green Berets in Fort Bragg and elite troops in Russia. He then served as bodyguard to General Khaled Nezzar, minister of Defence and one of the seven senior generals, or salopards (‘arseholes’) as GSPC fighters liked call them, who rule Algeria. He deserted the Algerian army not once, but twice, joining an armed Islamic terror group each time. His last desertion dated back to 1997, when he joined the GIA and then the GSPC under the leadership of Hassan Hattab. He soon emerged as an able man in the field, and a contender for Hattab’s crown. But the incident that clinched his fame was, according to the ‘official’ account at least, the result of an accident.

In February 2003, El Para and the men in the katiba el Maout, were still basking the ‘success’ of their spectacular ambush of an Algerian army column near Batna in the Aurès mountains, which had claimed the lives of over forty paratroopers. In order to make himself and his men scarce, El Para decided to travel south and buy some weapons in Niger. The katiba was crossing the remote desert near Illizi, a small town north of Djanet in the depths of the Algerian Sahara, when it happened to chance on a group of Swiss and German tourists who were indulging in some deep desert rough riding on all-terrain motorbikes, without a guide. Or so the story goes. El Para kidnapped the tourists and proceeded to lay his hands on a further five separate groups of European adventurers who had the misfortune of being in the Algerian Sahara and within the reach of El Para’s men in those months of February and March 2003.
After the final tourist had been captured, and a large number of Land Cruisers and dirt bikes requisitioned by the terrorists, El Para found himself in charge of a total of 32 hostages; sixteen Germans, ten Austrians, four Swiss, one Dutchman and a Swede. They were held captive in two completely separate groups, several hundred kilometres apart. El Para enlisted the help of Belmokhtar to guard them. A group of 16 hostages who had been captured in March were freed only a few months later after a bizarre ‘non’ battle with the Algerian army near Djanet. The other fifteen were held in the remote Tanezrouft desert and then taken south into Northern Mali, to a secret camp somewhere near Tessalit, the birthplace of Ibrahim and Hassan from Tinariwen. By the end of August, all but one of the hostages had been freed. Michaela Spitzer, a middle-aged German women, died of heat exhaustion and other desert maladies on the long trek from Algeria to Mali, and was buried in the desert.

El Para’s haul generated about 5 million euros in ransom revenue and cemented a relationship of sorts between the GSPC, the military security establishment of Mali, certain leaders of the Touareg rebellion, Arab army officers and business men and other key hustlers in the southern Sahara. The fatal agreement of the German and Swiss governments to pay a ransom established an irresistible economic case for further kidnappings, with disastrous consequences for the region and its relationship with the outside world. From that moment, tourism, an important means of livelihood for hundreds and thousands of Touareg, began to die a slow death. The doors of the desert creaked shut, slowly, inexorably. In the meantime, the GSPC used their ill-begotten lucre to buy more sophisticated weaponry, faster cars and the hearts and minds of more young recruits.

After numerous chases across vast expanses of desert with US special forces in hot pursuit, Aberrazak El Para was captured by the Chadian rebels of the MTDJ and kept prisoner in north western Chad, hidden away in the remote Tibesti mountains, until he was eventually handed over to Libya and then extradited back to Algeria. Since then, he has been the subject of a veritable judicial farce involving abortive and inconclusive trials in his native country. For many years after his return to Algeria in October 2004, he was kept in secret locations under the surveillance of the DRS, during which time he was tried in absentia and sentenced to death by an Algerian court. How the law of a land can find a man guilty in absentia when that country’s own security services are holding him in their custody is beyond baffling. Only recently, in 2011, was he transferred to a more ‘regular’ prison in Serkadji. His definitive trial for numerous crimes of terrorism, which include not only the 2003 kidnappings, but also the murder of seven French monks at Tibhirine  in 1996 (subject of the famous film ‘Of Gods and Men’) and of the paratroopers in the ambush near Batna, has yet to take place.

In reaction to this increase in terrorism and illicit trans-border activity, the US government declared a new front in the Sahel under the umbrella of Operation Enduring Freedom, their global war on terror. In 2004 the Americans set up the Pan-Sahel Initiative (PSI) to funnel training and equipment to the armies of Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad, in order to help establish specialist anti-terror and anti-crime units tasked with taking on and defeating both the Islamic terrorists and the traffickers. The PSI mutated into the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) in 2005, with a wide-ranging five year programme and a budget of half a billion dollars. Algeria, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia were brought into the field of play and anti-terror and anti-crime bases began to be established with American backing all over the southern Sahara and Sahel, including several in the Kidal region of north-eastern Mali. White men with army crew cuts were seen travelling through the desert in convoys of new 4×4 vehicles, or wandering nonchalantly around Kidal’s central market. US Army transport planes landed on Kidal’s dirt air-strip.

The Americans were convinced that the Sahel was becoming a crucible for anti-western terror groups inspired by Islam. Pondering the anti-american topography of the globe, they noticed that a huge contiguous swathe of central Asia, east and west Africa was becoming ‘radicalised’, from Afghanistan, through Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Yemen, into Africa via Somalia, the Sudan and across finally to Niger, Mali, Algeria and Mauritania. With that strategic and remote point of view so favoured by intelligence analysts and their political clients, this banana shaped chunk of earth was seen as a homogenous battleground, with each territory within it linked to the others by dark and hostile forces.

Tinariwen’s home region of the Adagh in north eastern Mali, right in the middle of the banana, was deemed especially significant in this struggle against terror. The Touareg from this region had long been categorised as ‘trouble-makers’ by governments and security heads, ever since the rebellion of 1963. The uprising of 2006 only confirmed this. Furthermore, a proselytising missionary organisation called the Tablighi Jama’at, who preached an uncompromising return to piety and the core tenets Islam had been active in the Adagh for many years, building mosques, organising social welfare at a grass-roots level, and charming political and tribal leaders with their vision of purity and the pursuit of religious excellence. The GSPC, who had begun to use the Adagh as a convenient rear-base, over the border and beyond the reach of the Algerian security apparatus, were also digging their claws into Adagh society, making alliances with local communities and leaders, and ’sweetening’ this desperately impoverished corner of the desert with their ill-gotten gains. The Saharanist Baz Lecocq also points out that the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, physicist Abdul Kadeer Khan, had become a fan of Mali’s northern deserts, and had bought himself a house in Timbuktu. Just over the border in Niger were the uranium mines of Arlit, from where, according to false information given to the Pentagon, Saddam Hussein had obtained the uranium for his weapons of mass destruction. There were huge as yet unexploited deposits of the mineral all over northern Niger and Mali.  This coincidence of dark and threatening circumstances was, for the Americans, a ‘no-brainer’.  And yet there were brains, and very good ones at that, who disputed the logic of American policy.

Professor Jeremy Keenan is a controversial figure in the global community of Saharanists. The bluff old English anthropologist once had an enviable reputation, rare for an anglophone academic, as a specialist on the Kel Ahaggar Touareg of southern Algeria. Despite a number of books and treatises by German, Danish, Dutch, Italian and American historians and anthropologists, the academic study of the Sahara has mainly been a francophone preserve.  Keenan’s seminal works The Touareg, People of the Ahaggar (1973), Sahara Man: Travelling with the Touareg (19??) and The Lesser Gods of the Sahara: Social Change and Contested Terrain (2004) are respectable mainstays of the Saharan bibliography. Then, in 2003, according to some of his fellow academics, Keenan ‘lost the plot.’  Or did he find it?

Fascinated by the 2003 hostage crisis, he became convinced that El Para was in fact, an agent of the DRS and that entire kidnapping episode had been masterminded by the black ops stooges of the Algerian secret services, with the approval of the CIA. Their aim was to concoct a high profile terrorist outrage, of sufficient magnetism to hypnotise the international media, and thereby provide a dramatic headline-grabbing premise for the USA to increase its military presence in the Sahara and Sahel. Whether by pure coincidence, or by some darker chain of cause and effect, it was indeed in the wake of El Para’s hostage grab that the USA began the implementation of various large scale military-security initiatives in the Sahel. The result is that US influence in the Sahel, and especially in Mali and Mauritania, has increased exponentially, and military ties of a seemingly deep and enduring nature have been cemented with with the regional powers.  What’s in it for the Americans?  Well, according to Keenan and the conspiracy theorists, it’s all the usual unholy grails:  Security, influence, oil and blocking the Chinese take over of Africa.

For Professor Keenan, going public with this enticing conspiracy theory represented a leap out of hard-edged factual academia and into the murky world of supposition. The change was reflected perhaps in the fact that he chose to publish his first article on the subject, entitled ‘Building Castles in the Sand: US Military Basing in Algeria’ (Review of African Political Economy, Dec 2003) under the engaging pseudonym of Mustafa Barth. Keenan then resumed his habitual identity and published numerous lengthy articles exploring the obscure whys and wherefores of his theory, which he eventually summarised in his book ‘The Dark Sahara’, published in 2009.

But Keenan wasn’t the only one to smell a desert rat. Algerian journalists like Salima Mellah and Salima Tlemçani have also written extensively about DRS involvement in terror groups, and about the many unanswered questions that still hover around the 2003 hostage crisis. Frenchmen, like the terrorism consultant Alain Chevalérias and François Gèze, the CEO of Éditions La Découverte, also support the notion of DRS collusion with the GSPC and AQIM.  In fact, a sizeable body of French and Algerian writers, journalists, analysts and obsessives continue to uphold the idea that El Para was a DRS man through and through. They see nothing surprising or outrageous in the claim. After all, cases of collusion and manipulation of Islamist groups by the Algerian secret services during the ‘dirty war’ of 1990s are legion. El Para was a ‘special ops’ man in the Algerian army before he allegedly became an Islamist. Join the dots and this was just more of the same.

For these doubters, there’s too much about the 2003 hostage crisis that doesn’t chime. According to the hostages themselves, far from being the result of happenstance, the kidnappings seem to have been prepared in advance, although clearly not that well. Soon after their capture, they were taken to secret bases in the desert, already stocked with food and provisions, along specially prepared tracks. Their captors, who didn’t seem to know the desert or its climate very well, were never short of provisions. Where did these provisions come from and who supplied them?  The hostages saw Algerian army helicopters flying near the base, almost on a daily basis, and were perplexed as to why their location hadn’t been discovered and they hadn’t been freed. El Para issued no ransom demand for months and the GSPC itself never actually claimed any official responsibility at all for the kidnappings. The GSPC had never taken western hostages before. It just wasn’t their style. Why now?

After the initial kidnappings, a bizarre silence reigned around the whole affair, both nationally and internationally, at least until mid April.  The first group of 17 hostages were freed near Amguid only three days after the German foreign minister, Joska Fischer and the head of German intelligence paid a high level visit to Algiers. The ‘light skirmish’ that took place during the Algerian army’s assault on the camp seemed, according to several hostages, to have been staged.  All the debriefings of hostages in Algeria were conducted by the DRS and not the army or police. Back in Germany the hostages underwent further interrogations, this time by the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German criminal investigation police.  Several hostages were astonished to be shown photos of their captors by the BKA, photos that were recently taken, at ground level.

By mid June, the second group of 15 hostages were being held in remote mountain range north west of Tamanrasset. Although they had been in captivity since mid February, El Para had yet to issue a formal ransom demand. He asked a french speaking hostage to help him write a letter to the Swiss and German embassies in Algiers, but it contained nothing except a rather verbose outline of the GSPC’s general aims and philosophy. El Para himself was often absent from the group, leaving his fellow jihadists perplexed and ignorant of his purpose or whereabouts, feelings which became the cause of increasing frustration among the katiba’s foot soldiers.

Towards the end of June, El Para came back to the camp and lead the entire group south into northern Mali, an arduous and often waterless journey that cost the life of Michaela Sptizer. By mid july, a full five months after the kidnapping of the first hostages near Djanet, El Para was finally in contact with the German Embassy in Bamako to begin formal ransom negotiations, albeit amid much confusion and uncertainty. During the negotiations, various Malian mediators including Touareg rebel leaders like Iyad Ag Ghaly, Alhaji Ag Gamou and Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, or northern Arab strong men like Colonel Ould Meydou and Major-Colonel Lamana Ould Bou, were tasked by the Malian government with leading negotiations.

The question of what alliances were then formed and what promises were then made is the subject of enduring and irresolvable debate between Sahara heads and conspiracy theorists. What’s certain is that from this moment onwards AQIM acquired a ‘home from home’ in the north east of Mali, a safe haven in which the terrorists could while away the hours and days with their hostages whilst the business of ransom negotiation was pursued. With a couple of rare if significant exceptions, AQIM have never actually kidnapped their victims on Malian soil.  They’ve only brought them back to Mali for safe-keeping. And with the equally rare exception of a major clash north of Timbuktu in July 2009, in which 28 soldiers were killed, the Malian army have never actually lead a full frontal assault on Al Qaida.

These two facts alone have lead many conspiracy theorists and almost the entire Touareg intelligentsia at home and abroad, to conclude that Al Qaida were invited on to Malian soil by the Malian government in order to the discredit the Touareg nationalist movement and mask the illegal trafficking going on in the north, from which a number of middle-ranking and senior Malian officials were drawing hefty amounts of black cash. In the atmosphere of anti-Islamist paranoia that seized the world following the 9/11 attacks, it was expedient for any government to twist the international image of a recalcitrant separatist movement and pass it off as an Islamist terror one instead. The strategy masked the true nature of the separatist struggle, confused international opinion and secured almost immediate benefits in the form of better diplomatic and security ties with the USA and Europe, more military aid, both in money and in kind. That’s what happened in Mali in the years following 2003.

The problem with the theory of collusion between AQIM and the Malian government is that no firm evidence has ever been produced to back it up. No one has actually photographed or recorded a Malian army officer or secret service agent chatting with an Al Qaida emir, or taking possession of a fat brown envelope full of narco-cash in some distant corner of the northern deserts. Of course, that’s the nature of this shadowy world. Nothing is ever written down. Dirty deals are done behind closed doors, or on an impossibly remote sand dune right in the middle of nowhere. The north of Mali has been closed to outsiders, especially journalists, for years.  AQIM money is carefully laundered through various banks and legitimate businesses in Mali, Niger, Mauritania and further afield. Or it’s used to buy huge herds that chomp happily on the pastures of the north, away from the prying eyes of the world. There are no witnesses on record because there has never been any proper investigation. And even if there had been, who would risk their skin to expose skullduggery at such high levels. Fully uncovering the matrix of villainy that has been choking Tinariwen’s homeland since the beginning of the millennium presents a journalistic challenge that would make Watergate look like an episode of Miss Marple.

At the moment, all it can ever boil down to is one enormous hunch, a devil’s choice between a damning and a marginally less damning scenario. At best, finding AQIM on their territory, the Malian government just left them there to fester, knowing full well that their presence would putrefy the social fabric of the northern deserts. They did this because they didn’t want to risk Malian lives by taking fight to the terrorists, and / or because there were Northern Arabs in the Malian army and secret services who had strong family and cultural ties to AQIM and encouraged its presence on Malian soil because it provided an effective screen behind which they could continue with their high-stakes smuggling. Furthermore, AQIM’s presence in the north east would sully the Touareg independence cause with the taint of Islamic terrorism, an especially apt consideration following the Touareg rebellion of May 23rd 2006. At worst, all of the above is true, except that instead of waking up one morning and finding them there, the Malians actually invited AQIM to come and establish their iniquitous presence on this once open and welcoming land. That Malian policy towards AQIM should have been quite so cynical might come as quite a surprise to many. Diplomats at the US Embassy in Bamako were certainly quit taken aback when, in October 2006, a key official in the Malian Ministry of Territorial Administration told them that hostilities between the GSPC and the latest in a long line of Touareg rebel movements, the ADC, worked to the government of Mali’s advantage. Following clashes between the Touareg rebels and the GSPC, the terrorists had vowed to wipe out the ADC leadership. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” stated the Malian politician. Exactly how friendly, he refused to say.

On August 18th 2003, El Para’s remaining fourteen hostages were finally handed over to the Malian authorities and driven back to Bamako via Gao. Their ordeal was over. The Americans ‘honoured’ El Para by conferring the title of “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” on him, one normally reserved only for the “most wanted” of jihadis, including Osama Bin Laden. A court in Karlsruhe, Germany, issued an international arrest warrant for El Para, but neither Germany nor the US made any real attempt to bring him to justice. No due and proper police investigation or judicial process was ever conducted against El Para and his men, either in Algeria or Europe. After the hostages returned home to Europe, some of them seemed to display the partial effects of Stockholm Syndrome and spoke about the strangely warm and amicable relationships they had struck up with some of their captors, referring to them not as brutal terrorists, but almost as friends, much in the same way that a desert tourist might remember his or her guide after the Saharan trip of a lifetime. It seems that one of the GSPC men even gave the hostages his personal mobile number, and that a year after their release, some of the hostages were still in touch with him.
Whatever the mission or the alliances that motivated El Para in this affair, the German government committed a grave and unpardonable error in the opinion of many when they handed over their huge ransom to El Para and his men. Kidnapping now had form and precedence in the criminal sub-culture of the region, and it was adopted as a strategy of choice by an Islamic insurgency who had never indulged in it before. It became the fast-track to cash par excellence, far more effective than cigarettes, arms, drugs and protection rackets. And what’s more, it had the immense advantage of generating huge international publicity and sowing fear in the hearts and minds of western infidels. It was win, win and double win.

The great El Para kidnap of 2003 begs questions and attracts speculation like flies to a carcass. But maybe it should be taken at face value. The hostages confirmed that their kidnappers were fanatically devout, and obsessed with all the usual jihadi obsessions:  the moral failures of western civilisation, the evil of America, the ‘Great Satan’, and its zionist plot to support Israel and rob the Arab world of its freedom and dignity, the heinous crime of fighting a new crusade against the muslim brothers in Kuwait and Iraq, so near the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, the crimes committed against Muslim brothers in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and Palestine. All the usual stuff. And far from serving the DRS or the CIA, perhaps El Para was merely out to replenish the GSPC coffers. Kidnapping westerners – the killer cash machine.

And yet, despite all these core and fringe benefits, it was to be another five years before AQIM kidnapped another westerner. That fact alone gives pause to wonder. In January 2004, just six months after El Para released his final hostages, the third Festival in the Desert took place amidst the talcum white dunes of Essakane, 60 kilometres due west of Timbuktu, the Malian home of Mokhtar Belmokhtar and many of his Arab Berabiche allies. At least five hundred westerners made their way along the appalling track that links Timbuktu and Essakane, often getting bogged down in the soft sand for hours, even days. In terms of kidnapping potential, we were a turkey shoot. Not only that, but the very presence of a horde of westerners dancing, carousing and revelling in the pure white sands of a Muslim Sahara was surely in itself an unpardonable affront to the Salafist principles of the GSPC. But no band of GSPC desperadoes touting AK47s ever appeared. Not a single solitary bearded preacher or fanatic reared his head to disturb our revels. The atmosphere was open, generous, tolerant, as it always had been in Mali.

The same thing happened in January 2005 and 2006. During those years I travelled with scores of others – French, English, Italian, American, German, Dutch – to see Tinariwen, bombing up to Kidal, Tessalit, Aguel’hoc, Anefis and Gao without a care in the world apart from running out of petrol or missing the flight back home due to a broken axel. Only a few years later, this area was to become the red zone, the off-bounds fiefdom of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb which was deemed suicidal for a westerner to visit. But until 2009, despite El Para’s introduction of the kidnapping business into the region, tourism thrived in Mali’s north east in a state of prelapsarian innocence.

That’s not to say that the GSPC went to ground entirely in those intervening years.  After the capture of El Para in Chad in March 2004, the GSPC slowed down their Saharan activities and went through a period of reorganisation. The 9th zone, which had been under the total control of Mokhtar Belmokhtar for some years, was split into two katibat, the katiba Al Moulathamoun, under Belmokhtar’s command, and the katiba Tarik Ibn Ziyad, aka Fatihin, under the command of Abou Zeid. The GSPC were also strengthening their international ties, especially Al Qaida in Iraq. The GSPC leadership had been impressed by the ‘successes’ of Abou Musab az-Zarqawi’s campaign of terror in Iraq between 2004 and 2006. In May 2005, Abdelmalek Droukdel issued a communiqué through an intermediary in which he requested support from his fellow mujahedeen in Iraq for his own struggle in North Africa. A few months later, a letter written to az-Zarqawi by a senior Al Qaida executive proposed an alliance between Al Qaida in Iraq and the GSPC, but not before their ideological strength and trustworthiness had been thoroughly checked. Intriguingly, the Al Qaida leadership still had a suspicion that the GSPC was heavily infiltrated by the Algerian secret services, a hunch that dated from the bad old days of the GIA. Nonetheless, the GSPC continued to followed az-Zarqawi’s exploits in Iraq with admiration and a certain amount of envy, especially when az-Zarqawi kidnapped and then executed two senior Algerian diplomats in the summer of 2005.

The GSPC’s thirst for moral cleansing and infidel blood was sharpened by the arrival of US troops in Mauritania, Mali and other countries in the Sahel from 2004 onwards. The mujahedeen saw this opening of a new battlefront in the US-lead war on terror, right on their doorstep, as a delicious provocation. Delicious, because they now felt part of a global rather than merely local struggle. In the autumn of 2005, the GSPC issued a proclamation that glorified this widening of the battle. “O young men of Islamic Maghreb…” it began, “from Egypt to Mauritania, Algeria to Nigeria, and the remainder of Muslim minorities in Africa. Many of you were unable to go to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Chechnya… However, Allah has brought those evil people to your own homelands… This prolonged and exhaustive war that was begun by Cheikh Usama Bin Laden is starting to bear fruit… This is your chance to erase colonial borders…that were established surrounding our Islamic countries and turning them into prisons ruled by various oppressors who have trampled on our religion and defended our enemies…therefore, demolish those borders. O young Muslim men, travel to the battlefields and attack the fortresses of the criminals and their supporters…Our war against the crusader American enemy is closely linked to the wars of our Muslim brothers around the world. [We] will be another brigade to join the brigades of holy jihad manifested by the holy attacks on New York and Washington under the leadership of Usama Bin Laden.”

The call was being answered in the Sahara; both the Tariq ibn Ziyad and the Mouthalamoun brigades saw increases in their fighter numbers in this period, although neither ever exceeded a couple of hundred. The GSPC was mutating into transnational enterprise. Algerians, Malians, Nigeriens, Nigerians, Moroccans, Libyans, Mauritanians, Burkinabés, Senegalese, Guinéens, Ivory Coasters, Beninois joined up to the cause in a sombre rainbow of ardent young hearts. These youth, often barely past their mid teens, were often recruited in mosques and Qu’ranic schools, seduced by inflammable speeches on grubby cassettes or videos of mujahedeen in Iraq and Afghanistan blowing up US army convoys and giving the Satanic west a bloody nose. Sometimes they promised the chance to fight for Allah in these distant lands, but ended up somewhere under the Sahara sun, as unforgiving as their own born-again spirit. Stripped down, the basic attraction of jihad was simple. It offered opportunities to young men who otherwise had none at all; opportunities to travel, to earn a little money, to carry arms, to defend Islam, to feel a part of something large, important, purposeful. Youth needs opportunity and in lands where poverty, displacement, war, corruption and social degradation have destroyed all most opportunities, it’s a case of take whatever comes along.

The GSPC now needed a major coup to prove the combat readiness and effectiveness of these new southern brigades. For the next major outrage following the 2003 kidnappings, they turned their attention to Mauritania, a country that had hitherto been spared the whip of Islamist violence, and launched an attack near Lemgheity, an outpost of impossible remoteness in the far north east of Mauritania, 400 kilometres east from the mining town of Zouérate. You’ll find it hard to get hold of a map that even recognises Lemgheity’s existence. On the fourth of June 2005 about one hundred and fifty mujahedeen sporting battle fatigues and black cheches attacked a Mauritanian army convoy near the village, killing fifteen soldiers and wounding seventeen more. Belmokhtar and his Mouthalamoun brigade were later revealed to be responsible for this strike. His declared aim was to punish Mauritania for having diplomatic relations with Israel and for cultivating alliances with the Great Satan.  Three days later, the US led ‘Operation Flintlock 2005’ against terrorism in the Sahel was launched, with the arrival of up to 1000 US military personnel in Nouakchott. Another red rag to the conspiracy bull.

In April 2006, a GSPC convoy carrying arms through the desert south of Ghardaia attacked a unit of Algerian customs men and killed thirteen of them. The army responded swiftly and heavily, killing a number of GSPC fighters and recovering a trawl of weapons, bought in Niger and destined for northern Algeria, that included: 1 x heavy machine gun, 6 x RPGs, 1 x mortar canon, 4 x RPK machine guns, 59 x automatic machine guns, 15 hand pistols, 311 ammunition chargers, 53 mortar shells and 16 cases of ammunition. Mokhtar Belmokhtar was reportedly behind the attack but, as always, he evaded his pursuers and simply disappeared into the desert.

Meanwhile, the links that El Para, Belmokhtar, Droukdel, Nabil Sahraoui and others had been forging for years had borne fruit. In late 2006, on the ultra-symbolic date of September 11th, Ayman Al Zawahiri, Al Qaida’s no. 2, announced that the GSPC was now officially aligned to the global jihadi franchise. The GSPC pre-empted Al Zawahiri’s announcement with a communiqué released a few days his announcement. “We swear allegiance to Cheikh Ousama Ben Laden,” it read. “We will pursue jihad in Algeria. Our fighters are under his orders so that he might strike who he wants where he wants through our intercession… We advise our brothers in all the other jihadi movements, everywhere in the world, not to miss this blessed union. Al Qaida is the only organisation able to bring together all the mujahedeen, to represent the Islamic nation, and speak on its behalf.”  In a separate posting, Abdelmalik Droukdel claimed that “God ordered us to be untied, to be allied, to cooperate and fight against the idolaters…the same way they fight us as military allies and in economic and political groupings. Why shouldn’t we join our brothers while almost all these nations have united against Muslims and separated them, dividing their land, and taking away their Al Aqsa mosque. These crimes are committed by the Jewish-Crusader alliance.”  Unity…oneness…tawhid. After so many years of division, of in-fighting, of isolation and internal strife, all the mujahedeen of north Africa would now be united in one struggle, one jihad, under the banner of Al Qaida, in the service of the ultimate goal, an Islamic caliphate, not only in Algeria, but in all the Muslim lands of North and West Africa. Jihad in North Africa was now ‘fit’ for the new globalised millennium.

A few months later, in January 2007, the GSPC changed its name to Tanzim al-Qa’ida fi-Bilad al-Maghreb al-Islam or The Al Qaida Fighting Group in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb. The title quickly contracted to the more portable AQIM or AQMI in the Francophone world, a big nightmare with a little name. The GSPC and Al Qaida leaders hoped that the group would eventually incorporate the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (MICG), the Libyan Islamic Combatant Group (LICG) and the Tunisian Islamic Combatant Group (TICG) into one structure, headed by the GSPC emirs. It was a classic efficiency drive, a rationalisation of disparate entities in the service of greater synergy and success, the kind of process that any management consultant might be proud to foist on a client. It was accompanied by a snappy new website, which proved that the Algerians were learning lessons from their more media and marketing savvy Al Qaida partners.

The last attack perpetrated by the GSPC before they rebranded themselves AQIM occurred on 10th December 2006. Two buses carrying employees of Brown Root & Condor, a joint venture between the Algerian state oil giant Sonatrach and the US firm Halliburton, were blown up as they drove from the wealthy suburb of Bouchaoui back to the Sheraton Hotel in Algiers. An Algerian driver and an American employee were killed. At the time, Brown Root & Condor was implicated in a vast and juicy scandal involving massive overpayments for goods and services, often of American provenance. The company had been distributing the proverbial bulky brown envelopes, stuffed with thousands of dinars and dollars in kickbacks and inducements to senior personnel in Halliburton and Sonatrach as well as the wider military, security and energy communities for years. Brown Root & Condor, which was founded back in 1994, was the nodal point in a tight relationship between the military-industrial complexes of America and Algeria which grew steadily throughout the 1990s and then flourished like a shameless bougainvillea following the attacks of September 11th, 2001. The US security establishment realised that no one in world had more experience of the dark arts of fighting terrorism than Algeria and its DRS, and the Algerian security establishment was only to happy to provide their powerful new friends with information, expertise and lucrative procurement contracts.

2006 had been a relatively light year in GSPC annals. 2007 however was bathed in blood. It started with the detonation of seven bombs at police stations in the Boumerdès and Tizi Ouzou districts of northeastern Algeria. In March AQIM attacked a bus carrying employees of Stroitransgaz, the Russian firm that was building a gas pipeline from the fields in south west of the country up to the Mediterranean coast.  One Russian and three Algerians were killed.  Matters degenerated from there on.  Scores and scores of people, both security personnel and civilians, died in AQIM attacks in Lakhdaria, Batna, Dellys and Algiers. Kidnapping also flourished in the north. Capturing men of wealth, or members of their family, and cashing them in for fat ransoms became a work-a-day pastime. In 2007, there was at least one kidnapping incident a day in Algeria, although, interestingly, none of the victims were European or American. This was thanks in part to the assiduous security measures that were taken to protect foreign business men, workers and tourists. Overall, it was one of bloodiest seasons in the history of the troubles. But none of the violence touched the southern Sahara until the end of the year.

On Christmas Eve 2007, François Tollet, a 73 year old retired chemist from the Charentes area of France was driving south on the road between Aleg and Maghta Lahjar, about 250 kilometres south east of Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. With him in the car were his brother Gérard, his two grown up sons Jean-Philippe and Didier, and a childhood friend of Didier’s, Adda Hacène. They had stopped by the side of the road for a picnic lunch when three turbaned men drove up in a black mercedes, got out and demanded money. When the tourists refused to hand over their cash, the assailants took out AK-47 rifles and killed four of them; Tollet’s two sons, his brother and his friend. Only François Tollet survived the attack, although he was severely wounded in the leg.

Tollet had long been a fan of Africa and the desert, and had travelled there almost on a yearly basis. How cruelly the desert betrayed that love. Or had it always been misplaced? Do desert lovers like Tollet swim in the rose-water of its seemingly endless hospitality, its generosity of space and time, the sweet calmness of its sunset hour. Are they blind to the human struggle that goes on in the Sahara every day, the poverty, the corruption and the anger, the nurseries of violence and extremism. I’ve often pondered that question. Maybe Tollet has too. This was the first time he had taken his two sons along with him on one of his African road trips. To see them murdered with his own eyes, in cold blood, by the side of a lonely desert road, in an immensity of sand and rock stretching to a wide and level horizon, must have been like a punch in the gut from a fist that had once belonged to a friend.

The Mauritanian authorities were quick to lay the blame for the attack at the door of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. But this knee-jerk attribution was treated with suspicion by some in Mauritania. “I don’t believe in the terrorist attack theory,” a local journalist told The Figaro newspaper, “The GSPC men could more easily have struck in the tourist region of the Adrar if they had wanted to carry out a big coup.” Three men were eventually arrested in Guinea Bissau thanks to an operation reportedly masterminded by French intelligence. One of them, Sidi Ould Sidna, then escaped from the Palace of Justice in Nouakchott before being recaptured by Mauritianian security forces in April 2008. He was only 21 years old. Another jihadist, Maarouf Ould Haiba, an ex soldier and petty criminal, was already behind bars, having admitted taking part in the killing. “I killed those French miscreants,” he told the Mauritanian court.

The attack on Tollet and his family took place over two thousand kilometres away from Tinariwen’s homeland in north eastern Mali. There was a palpable fever of insecurity at the time but that was as a result of the recent Touareg uprising and not Islamic terrorism. Then, on February 22nd 2008, a full five years after El Para’s hostage coup, the strange hiatus in the Islamist kidnapping game came to an end. Wolfgang Ebner and Andrea Kloiber, a tourist couple from Salzburg in Austria, were kidnapped as they were exploring in the Matmata region of south eastern Tunisia, close by the Algerian border, an area famous for its caves and the troglodyte hotel which starred as the original home of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars IV.

Ebner and Koiber were reportedly captured by the Tarik ibn Ziad katiba of AQIM, lead by the dreaded Cheikh Abdelhamid Abou Zeid.  Abou Zeid was born Mohammed Ghadir, sometime in the mid to late 1950s, no one knows exactly when. His family belonged to the Chaamba, originally a nomadic tribe that roamed with their herds between Debdeb and El Oued in the far eastern corner of Algeria, near the Libyan border. Abou Zeid’s spent most of his youth looking after the family goats and camels and occasionally attending Qur’anic school. Life was hard, but the young diminutive shepherd, whose nickname was “P’tit” (“Little’un”) was tough and resourceful. He was also steely, stubborn, and prone to violence if contradicted. By his early twenties, he already owned an old Land Rover and had started to smuggle goods, especially tea and cooking oil, along remote desert tracks that crisscrossed the nearby frontiers. The open desert tracks were to him like the sky is to an eagle. He was a loner, ascetic and austere, who abjured the pleasures of alcohol and cigarettes, although not necessarily women, of whom he married four by the end of the decade.

Over time Abou Zeid became a notorious smuggler, a status that earned him a few stints in the El Oued prison. Abou Zeid himself didn’t consider his activities to be criminal, just necessary for a decent life, and most of the youth of the Debdeb area shared his outlook. He even went on pilgrimage to Mecca twice during the late 1980s. His religious faith began to play a central and unforgiving role in his life. Abou Zeid’s strengthening zeal fused with an increasing hatred of the police, customs officials and border guards whose job it was to inhibit his ‘honest’ trade, galvanising eventually into a steely view of the world, streaked with a profound disgust for the political corruption, cronyism and moral degeneracy of modern Algeria. Thanks to his sweat, his courage, his cunning, Abou Zeid had escaped the pecking misery of his youth to become wealthy and independent. No one was going to steal the fruits of his hard labour from him.

When the FIS emerged as the torch bearer of anti-government fervour in the early 1990s, they found a willing recruit in Abou Zeid. He began to propound the imposition of Sharia law as the cure-all remedy for Algeria’s sins and became an active benefactor, distributing alms and food to the poor of Debdeb, especially during Ramadan. His faith was ardent and sincere, although he found the verbal niceties of political and spiritual debate hard to master, a weakness which blocked his path into mainstream politics or religious leadership. This lack of erudition left a void that fuelled envy and resentment against intellectuals who could spin words and ideas beyond his grasp.

In 1994, Abou Zeid was arrested and imprisoned for giving material support to terrorist groups. The charge wasn’t too far off the mark. Using his intimate knowledge of the secret pathways of the desert, Abou Zeid had been smuggling arms into Algeria from Libya and further south, and selling them on to the small terrorist groups who were already beginning to operate in the Sahara.  He was sentenced to three years in jail.  Prison was a school. Abou Zeid not only absorbed the violent fervour of the other mujahedeen who were locked up with him but he also learnt the tricks of jihad. On his release in 1997 he went underground, below the radar, with a brother and two uncles, joining a GIA katiba operating in the El Oued area. Its leaders had already been his associates in the clandestine supply game, and Abou Zeid was given the role of keeping his katiba stocked with guns, bullets, petrol and food. In 1998, he was sent on a mission to find new sources of arms further south, and he spent the next few years travelling throughout southern Algeria, Libya and northern Mali and Niger, cementing solid business relationships with traffickers, corrupt officials and bent army officers. If Mokhtar Belmokhtar was already enthroned as the King of the Saharan Islamist smugglers, Abou Zeid earned a reputation as the crown prince during those years.

After Hassan Hattab’s defection from the GIA and the creation of the GPSC, Abou Zeid found a natural ally in Abderrazak ‘El Para’, the new emir of the southern 5th zone. El Para made this tough resourceful man his lieutenant and kept him in his inner circle, until he decided Abou Zeid was ready to lead his own cell, the katiba Tariq Ibn Ziad. Its first mission, in 2002, was to prepare  for the planned expansion of jihad south into the Sahel and black Africa. The scene was set for the great hostage crisis of 2003, in which Abou Zeid played a crucial supporting role. His activities in the years between 2003 and 2008 are vague and barely known. However, with the kidnapping of Ebner and Kloiber, he returned to forefront of terrorism in the Sahara and has remained there ever since.

After their capture, the two Austrians were driven through Libya and Algeria and into northern Mali, where they were held in a secret base north of Kidal. It was Ennahar, an Algerian newspaper that has close links with the DRS, that published a list of the five prisoners that AQIM wanted freed in return for the lives of tourists in early March 2008. It included Amari Saïfi aka El Para, who was still being held by the DRS at the time, despite the fact that he had already condemned to death by an Algerian court.

A number of mediators were involved in the negotiations to free Ebner and Kloiber. One of them was Ibrahim Mohammed Assalegh, a Touareg member of the Malian national assembly. He spent months shuttling back and forth between Bamako and the far northeastern corner of the country, where the hostages were being held, although he claims he never actually met anyone from AQIM itself. He left that job to a well known smuggler and border hustler called Mahmoud Ag Mohamed, who came from In Khalil, the border town set up surreptitiously by the Algerian authorities as an ‘market’ for contraband traffic of all kinds. In Khalil isn’t the kind of place you’d ever want to spend a two week holiday. Think of it as a desert version of Dead Man’s Gulch, a lawless little burgh out in the middle of nowhere, a sinkhole of clandestino dreams built out of mud and sweat, a place to import, export, hand over, receive and then get the hell out as quick as humanly possible.

Assalegh and another Touareg bigwig, a former government minister called Mohamed Ag Erlaf, worked with the Malian secret services on a plan to persuade local nomadic groups to put pressure on Al Qaida to free the hostages. The nomads in question included Reguibat tribesmen from the Western Sahara, who Assalegh encountered in the far north of Mali, around the salt mines of Taodenni. He refers to them simply as ‘Polisario’, since the Western Sahara’s independence movement is largely made up of Reguibat. He urged all the nomads he met to help Mali free the hostages. If they didn’t, he argued, they might get caught in the crossfire of a war between the Malian army and Al Qaida. To Malian soldiers from the south, a man in a cheche is a man in a cheche, and differentiating between nomad and terrorist is testing, if not impossible.  The nomads in the north were also promised new wells, which were probably never delivered.
Apart from Assalegh and Ag Erlaf, several northern Arabs, or Berabiche were also involved in the negotiations to free Ebner and Kloiber. This group had the backing of Libya, who provided cash, vehicles, satellite phones and other essentials. Why would Libya be interested in helping a couple of kidnapped Austrian tourists?  Why, thanks to the warm friendship between far-right Austrian politician Jorg Haider and Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, of course. The desert cultivates strange relationships. Among the Arab team was Major Bou Ould Lamana, a native of Timbuktu who worked for the Malian secret services or DGSE and was a protégé of Colonel Mamy Coulibaly, the Malian secret service supremo. Ould Lamana was also suspected to have been involved in arms trafficking and selling weapons to the GSPC as far back as 2001. The US Embassy called him “The Saharan version of a bent cop.”

Ould Lamana was part of a coterie of northern Arab army officers, political officials and business men who wielded enormous influence and power. They were dons in northern Malian smuggling rackets, and their networks stretched far and wide through West Africa and the Maghreb. Chief among this group were Colonel Mohamed Abderrahmane Ould Meydou, a handsome brick-chinned officer who was one of the Malian army’s ‘desert foxes’, charged with keeping a semblance of government control in the lawless northern provinces and thumping recalcitrant Touareg rebels with his own hand-picked militia of fellow Arab fighters.  Then there was Mohammed Ould Aiwanatt, an immensely rich Arab trader and trafficker from the Tilemsi region north of Gao, whose fingers were stuck in all manner of merchandise, both sweet and sour.  And last, but not least, there was Baba Ould Cheikh, mayor of the tiny but criminally significant village of Tarkint, north of Bourem.

All these men had their legitimate trades, but a desert potentate cannot operate on a measly government salary or a polite business in kosher goods alone. You’ve got to cross a line or two if you want to be a big shot Saharan player. All four harvested rich pickings in an ever hardening sequence of contraband goods. Their role as government and Gaddafi-backed hostage-negotiators offered a number of synergies with their other activities, including influence, protection for smuggling rackets, fame, kudos and a handsome cut of the ransom pie.

Certain Touareg officials and traders also benefited from AQIM’s presence in northern Mali, even though negotiators like Ibrahim Mohammed Ag Assalegh deny ever receiving a penny for their services. Iyad Ag Ghali, the ultimate Touareg ‘fixer’ and hostage-negotiator has hardly said a word to the media, either national or international, since he swapped rebellion for God in the mid 1990s. But it seems unlikely that men of his ilk would get involved in such a strenuous, draining and time-consuming endeavour as negotiating the release of western hostages without receiving a cut of the millions of euros paid by some western governments in return for the freedom of their subjects. Most Malian Touareg leaders were genuine in their frequently-voiced fear that the presence of AQIM in northern Mali was likely to damage the reputation of their people and lead to a disastrous confusion of Touareg nationalism and Islamist terrorism in the minds of international governments, the media and the public at large. On the other hand, they also held the view that hostage-negotiation was a job that deserved a handsome pay-out. If western governments were going to pour these astronomical sums into the coffers of international terrorists, then why shouldn’t they be recompensed for their honest humanitarian efforts. Furthermore, lower down the food chain, Touaregs, whether petty criminals or ordinary young men out of luck and out of hope, also provided services to AQIM as drivers, guides, cooks, suppliers of fuel, food and other essentials, informants and even, ultimately, ‘procurers’, who job it was to actually kidnap the hapless victims and hand them over to men like Abou Zeid or Mokhtar Belmokhtar for a fee.
But the northern Malian Arabs were closer to AQIM than the Touareg, ethnically, linguistically, ideologically and commercially. They were plugged into networks of kith and kin that extended from Gao to Timbuktu up to Taodenni and deep in Mauritania and Algeria. The one-eyed AQIM emir Mokhtar Belmokhtar was married to an Arab woman from Timbuktu. He was part of a family there, and families in the southern Sahara can be like quasi-political organisations, with far-reaching roots and branches stretching from the Atlantic ocean to the shores of Libya.

Austria dispatched a four man team to Bamako to coordinate efforts to free the hostages, headed by the sharp-suited stripey-shirted diplomat Anton Prohaska. They refused to negotiate directly with Al Qaida, outwardly at least, but instead tried to persuade other ‘friendly’ Muslim nations to put pressure on the Al Qaida leadership. Their dealings with Malian bureaucracy were frustrating, especially when it came the head of the Malian secret services Col. Mamy Coulibaly, whom one of the Austrian team described as “long on promises but short on information.”  Prohaska did the rounds of the foreign embassies, frequently dropping into the US Embassy for a chat and some advice. Another Austrian team that was sent to Algiers also made little progress. One of them described the Algerians as “extremely tough and security minded.”  There was also a confusing side-track opened by the arrival of a two-man team from the private security firm Blackwater, already notorious for its work for the US government during its occupation of Iraq. The duo booked into one of Bamako swishest hotels and tendered their services to the Malian government and the Austrian, proclaiming their expertise in hostage negotiating and promising to liberate Ebner and Kloiber in return for a handsome cut of the ransom of course.  They weren’t successful.

The negotiations dragged and so did the months. Wolfgang Ebner’s son Bernhard pleaded with the terrorists to show clemency, and eventually came to Mali himself to try and help free his father, without success.  The phone lines between Vienna and Bamako vibrated with high-level but ineffectual diplomacy.  Prohaska was well into his eighth month in the Malian capital, and began telling all and sundry that his useful time there was coming to an end.  Ebner tried to escape from the AQIM camp in northern Mali, but managed to walk a mere 25 miles before he was picked up by a trucker who returned him to the camp. In the end, Ebner and Kloiber were released on October 31st 2008, nine months and nine days after they were kidnapped.  Did they survive thanks to nomadic pressure, or to the fact that they converted to Islam whilst in captivity, through spiritual conviction or dire expediency it’s hard to tell, or to the Berabiche negotiators and their Libyan slush fund?  No, probably none of the above. The real reason was a 2 million euro ransom that was brought to Bamako aboard a special Austrian government airplane by Ursula Plassnik, the Austrian minister of foreign affairs, on board a special flight.  2 million euros in a country where a teacher earns barely 70 euros a month.  It was about the same as paying 200 million euros to a criminal gang in Europe.  That kind of money buys you a lot of weapons, and brand new cars.  And influence.  No wonder Al Qaida’s appetite for ransoms only grew keener.

 Andy Morgan.   (c) 2013, all rights reserved.
An extract from my forthcoming book on Tinariwen and the story of the Sahara desert since independence.

The post GUNS, CIGARETTES AND SALAFI DREAMS – The roots of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

The trust that western powers, especially the US and France, once placed in the toppled regime of the ex-Malian President, Amadou Toumani Touré, has been betrayed in spectacular fashion. They trusted him because they thought, or rather hoped in face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that he was a true democrat. In fact he was a really soldier at heart, a machiavellian manipulator of tribal politics and sponsor of self-serving networks of interest, corruption and even crime.

The US hoped that by training the Malian army to fight the mujahedeen of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), who have been rampaging with near impunity in Mali’s northern deserts since 2008, they could empower a local solution to the problem of Islamic terrorism in the Sahel and avoid the pitfalls of doing the job themselves. Contrary to appearances, US global counter-terrorism policy has matured since the days when the Rumsfeld doctrine of direct military intervention was applied in Iraq. The Pentagon now knows that direct intervention is usually counter-productive, resurrecting as it does the red rag of American imperialism and driving hordes of young disaffected Arabs and Africans into the arms of Al Qaida and other terrorist groups.

It can be argued that indirect foreign military intervention has been partially successful in the case of Mauritania and Niger. Mauritania has been a willing participant in US counter-terrorism initiatives in the Sahel since 2002, including the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) that was launched in 2005 with an annual budget of $100 million. It has also been a cornerstone of the US military’s annual Operation Flintlock exercises designed to increase local military and security capacity in West Africa. France has helped to fund and train the Mauritanian army’s rapid reaction units, and has played an increasing role in advising and strengthening the Mauritanian judiciary.

As a result, Mauritania has become the most ardent and effective opponent of AQIM in region, clinching several modest military victories against the terror group, most notably the joint Mali-Mauritanian attack on the cell of the redoubtable AQIM emir Abou Zeid in the Wagadou Forest of northern Mali in June 2011.

But Mauritania’s belligerence could still cost it dear. AQIM’s virulent hatred of Mauritanian President Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz and his regime and the close links between local jihadists and the MUJAO, an AQIM spin off that now controls the strategically important city of Gao in eastern Mali, threaten to destabilise Mauritania. A massive car-bomb attempt on President Aziz’s life in February 2011 was foiled by the army but the President might not be so lucky next time. Furthermore, the Aziz regime has recently been mired in some weighty corruption scandals of its own, and there’s evidence that its popularity at home is on the slide. Mauritania’s close cooperation with the West could backfire if local disaffection translates into more willing jihadists on the ground.

President Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger has so far played a commendably level-headed and intelligent part in the crisis that has swamped the Sahel. The odds are against the world third poorest nation, beset as it is by the Libyan crisis to the north, the Malian civil war to the west and Boko Haram to the south, as well as catastrophic droughts, a massive refugee problem and the return of many thousands of migrant workers from Libya and other countries in the Maghreb.

Contrary to President Toure’s lax response in Mali, Issoufou was adamant about disarming Touareg fighters who flooded south into Ngier from the Libyan war last year. He has also made strenuous efforts to engage tribal chiefs and Touareg rebel leaders from Niger’s northern deserts in the country’s political institutions, promoting open government and freedom of expression in the process. His drive to achieve food self-sufficiency, a massively ambitious target that he’s busy promoting with the slogan Les Nigeriens Nourrissent Les Nigeriens – Nigeriens Feed Nigeriens – is both very necessary and popular at home. He has also been helped by the battle-fatigue caused by the bitter Touareg uprising of 2007-9.

Most importantly in regional terms, Issoufou is trying to turn the Malian crisis to his advantage by taking over from Mali as France’s most trusted and valued ally in the Sahel.  France needs Niger’s uranium, a fact that was strenuously underlined when President François Hollande met President Issoufou in Paris last June and urged him to make every effort to bring the massive new uranium mine at Imouraren in Niger on-stream as soon as possible. Niger and France have also been increasing their military cooperation and talking about a coordinated response to the terrorist threat.

Niger’s current state of grace is extremely fragile however. The problems of drought, refugees and returning migrants threaten to tip the country towards disaster at any moment. The Touareg in the north of the country could still make common cause with the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (NMLA), the Touareg rebel movement in northern Mali, presently licking its wounds after defeat at the hands of AQIM and its allies in Gao and Timbuktu, if their fortunes were ever to improve and the prospect of an independent Touareg-led Azawad became more likely.

In the case of Mali, however, the western policy of indirect intervention has been a disaster. The reasons for this are complex but boil down to the fact that, despite a few direct confrontations in 2010 and 2011 that cost the lives of a number of soldiers, Mali has never displayed the willingness or the military capacity needed to rid its country of the scourge of AQIM. Moreover, there is substantial evidence, including a direct admission made by the loyalist Touareg officer Colonel Alhadji Ag Gamou to the French newspaper Le Figaro in July this year, that Mali allowed AQIM to set up a safe-haven in the north east of the country, so long as it didn’t commit any acts of terrorism on Malian soil.

Why?  First, because Mali hoped that the presence of AQIM in the heart of Touareg rebel country would seriously damage and divide the Touareg secessionist cause.  In that regard, their hopes have been fully answered by recent events. Secondly, AQIM managed to  orge strong alliances with certain powerful figures from the Arab communities in northern Mali, some of whom were involved in drug and weapons trafficking. The government in Bamako had an interest in keeping these powerful northern figures on their side. And thirdly, the Malian army has always been incapable of securing military victory in the north, either against Touareg rebels or Islamic terrorists. Better to leave AQIM be than risk the lives of many more ordinary Malian soldiers. Despite this, the USA and France continued to pour millions into Mali’s military and security apparatus, money that all too often evaporated like a desert mirage as soon as it was spent. You need only read the cables sent by the US Embassy in Bamako and later exposed by Wikileaks to feel the extreme frustration that Mali’s lack of resolve in its fight against AQIM provoked in the diplomatic community in Bamako and elsewhere.

Thanks to bitter experience, the US now knows that you cannot use southern armies, who are used to combat in temperate sub-Saharan zones, to fight wars out in the open deserts of the Sahara. That’s why it has been reluctant to support a regional threat to launch an ECOWAS force of 3,000 troops against the various armed groups in the north of Mali, and has made sure that this reluctance has been echoed by the UN.

The only force capable of taking on and beating AQIM in northern Mali is the Algerian army. The armies of Morocco or Chad might also prove effective, but neither country has shown any willingness to become militarily involved so far, even if it were ever possible for them to do so, which is doubtful. The belief is growing that Algeria holds most of the keys to the problem. Nevertheless, it has always considered northern Mali to be its own backyard, and has put every possible effort into keeping it free of outside interference, whether from France, America, ECOWAS or anybody else. Moreover, so far at least, Algeria has kept its substantial military might well within its own borders.

Not that Algeria is unconcerned about the chaos in Mali. On the contrary, it views the idea of an independent Touareg state on its southern borders with extreme alarm. It has a substantial Touareg population of its own, who dominate its strategically important and mineral-rich southern deserts, and it fears that a Touareg victory in Mali could provoke those desert populations into copy-cat dissent. This fear also extends to the numerous other Berber populations in Algeria, especially the economically and politically powerful Kabyles. Algeria knows that any Touareg victory will be seen as a Berber victory at home, and the Berber cause for greater political and cultural rights has been a thorn in the foot of every Algerian government since independence.

The same is true in Libya, a country riven by racism and ethnic strife that has increased tenfold since the demise of Ghadafi. Recent anti-Touareg pogroms in the southern city of Ghadames and clashes between black-skinned Tubu and armed Arab militia in Sebha demonstrate the volatile relationship of Berber and African minorities with the Arab majority. Salafist elements in the new government see an AQIM hegemony over northern Mali as preferable to a Touareg state. Moreover, most of the weapons currently blighting the peace of northern Mali come from Libyan arsenals.

Rather than sending in the troops, Algeria has played an extremely subtle hand in the current conflict. Just before the outbreak of the Touareg rebellion in January, it sent a group of military personnel to the strategically important army base in the northern Malian town of Tessalit. As the NMLA wanted to avoid an open confrontation with Algeria at all costs, this move had the effect of delaying a Touareg victory by several months. Then, whether by shady design piloted by the Algeria secret services or merely by happenstance, AQIM and its allies managed to hi-jack the Touareg rebellion and kick the idea of an independent Azawad into the long grass. This outcome suited Algeria, despite the fact that the leaders of AQIM are ex-members of the GIA and GSPC, the terrorist groups responsible for the worst of the violence during Algeria’s dark decade of the 1990s. Better in Algeria’s mind for these home-grown jihadist to be causing havoc outside Algerian borders, than to let the existence of an independent Touareg state threaten Algeria’s territorial integrity.

Both France and the USA have never managed to have much leverage on Algerian foreign policy. The only real and immediate military solution to the chaos in northern Mali is therefore frustratingly beyond their grasp. The dominant super-powers will be forced to find other ways of containing the Islamist threat in the Sahel, a threat that could turn the entire region against them and spread into Europe and beyond.

Some fundamental questions will need to be asked. Can African governments be trusted to fight terror and crime, even if they are democratically elected?  What is more important, the integrity of African states or the fight against Islamic terrorism?  Is the nation-state even the best form of political organization in the Sahara?  Is it possible to win the war on terror with military might alone?  Finding answers to these questions is a challenge that becomes more and more pressing as the black flag continues to flutter over Timbuktu.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2012

First published in BBC Focus On Africa Magazine – September 2012

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These are serious accusations which bolster the long-standing theory that Algeria is using Islamist groups as proxies in Northern Mali to carry out its principle foreign policy aims in the region. These aims are, first and foremost, to prevent the creation of an independent state of Azawad by any means necessary.  Secondly, to make sure no foreign power, apart from itself of course, sends troops or humanitarian aid to northern Mali.  Thirdly, to ensure that Algeria remains the primary economic, diplomatic, political and developmental force in the region. And lastly, to make sure that Algeria eventually regains its historic role as power-broker and mediator par excellence in any conflict between Touareg separatists in the north east of Mali and the government in Bamako.  The job has temporarily been given to Burkina Faso, after the MNLA refused to allow Algeria to play their usual role back in February, stating that Algerian mediation had always ended proving disastrous for the Touareg cause. Algeria would like that role back.

Almost every leading politician or military leader of note with more than a passing interest in the situation in northern Mali has been beating a path to Algiers in recent weeks, from the newly appointed French foreign minister Laurent Fabius to the Malian Prime Minster Cheikh Modibo, as well as officers from the now as-good-as defunct Malian army.  For the moment, the Algerian government is listening and sitting pretty, refusing to take part in any military intervention in the north east whilst allowing the kudos and the solicitations to accrue.  The cynics and conspiracy-theorists would say that it doesn’t have to intervene militarily.  It has proxies like Iyad Ag Ghali and his Islamist Ansar ud-Dine militia or Al Qaida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in situ, on the ground, fulfilling its military objectives in a satisfactory way already.  But when the time is right, it will be ready and able move in the troops.

Whether or not the Algerian secret services, the DRS, are the puppeteers of the current chaos in northern Mali, Algeria’s policy in the region should become part of the curriculum taught to every student of African politics or international relations for years to come.  To put it simply, it has been masterful.  The prospect of an independent Azawad was no more welcome to Algeria at the start of the conflict than the prospect of an independent Kurdistan is to Turkey or Iran.  The Touareg of southern Algeria have never been as rebellious and belligerent as their cousins in northern Mali, but the government in Algiers knows full well that it wouldn’t take much to turn the simmering social tensions in its southern Saharan wilayas, or provinces, into a conflagration that it might find hard to control. The very idea of Touareg independence only needs success, or the perception of success, to gain considerable traction amongst the Touareg populations of other countries in the region, especially Algeria, Niger and Libya.  Furthermore, Touareg success is seen as Berber success, especially by Berber minorities in Algeria and Libya who have hungered for some kind of breakthrough in their fight for great political and cultural freedom for a long time.  The Berber struggle, particularly in the northern Algerian province of Kabylia, has been the main internal headache of Algerian governments since independence.  The last thing President Bouteflika needs right now in these fragile post-Arab ‘Spring’ times is for the numerous and restless Kabyle in his country, fired-up by the onward march of their Berber cousins in northern Mali, to launch a major uprising or secessionist attempt.

Moreover, Algeria takes a dim view of the prospect of Touareg separatists entering into any kind of cosy relationship with France and thereby letting the old colonial power regain a central role in the affairs of the Sahara, a role it has coveted ever since the late 1950s when it made an attempt to keep hold of the Sahara after independence.  France has always said that it’s number one priority is to put Mali back together again. But when will fighting Islamic terrorism override the priority of territorial integrity in the Sahel. And if it does, wouldn’t the MNLA, who are desperately putting themselves forward for the job, partner up well with France in the fight to rid northern Mali of rabid Islamist mujahedeen. The US, who, as the many Wikileaked Bamako embassy cables prove, have long had a surprisingly good grasp of the arcane politics of northern Mali, are no doubt asking themselves the same questions.  But, to put it crudely, Algeria’s general message to France, Europe and the US since the start of the uprising has been “Hands off!  The north of Mali has always been our backyard and we intend to keep it that way.”  Although the mineral and oil wealth that supposedly lies tantalizingly close under the sands of northern Mali has yet to be fully exploited, Algeria will aim to make sure that it has a major hand in its exploitation when the time comes.  It doesn’t want Australian, Canadian, French or Qatari companies sticking their mining noses in an area they feel is rightfully theirs.

When Khadafy fell last autumn, the prospects for Algerian foreign policy in northern Mali weren’t good. Contrary to popular belief, the wily Libyan dictator, who was as averse to the idea of an independent Touareg state in the Sahara as his counterparts in Algiers, had always been able to control, dampen and snuff out troublesome outbreaks of Touareg rebelliousness whilst simultaneously strutting around pretending to be a great friend of the Touareg and supporter of their cause.  With Khadafy’s useful blocking presence now swept away, and with truckloads of weapons pouring out of the arsenals of Libya, Algeria knew even before the outbreak of the rebellion on January 17th, that this time round, Touareg nationalism in northern Mali was going to become a major headache and foreign policy challenge. The MNLA’s rebuff of their early mediation proposal only enhanced that uneasy feeling.  But wisely, instead of carrying out a full frontal military intervention, they sat and waited, bolstering the military readiness of their army units stationed in Tamanrasset, and boosting their air-strike capacity.  They also sent a small contingent of army personnel to the key Malian military base of Amachache in Tessalit, a move which cleverly delayed the MNLA’s full frontal assault on the base by several weeks.  Meanwhile they refused to allow wounded MNLA soldiers into Algeria to get treatment, in contravention of the Geneva convention, and contained the many thousands of refugees who poured over their southern borders, fleeing the conflict.

In late March, when it looked like the Malian army was being routed by the MNLA and their Touareg Islamist allies in Ansar ud-Dine, and that total defeat was only days away, seven Algerian diplomats were kidnapped by the Islamist militia, the MUJAO, from the Algerian consulate in Gao.  Whether the dark hand of DRS manipulation played a part in this event or not, it allowed Algeria to present itself as a victim of the troubles, with a grievance that might legitimize its intervention, if necessary.  Then, after the MNLA prematurely declared the independence of Azawad on April 1st, matters began to go miraculously well for Algeria.  The boss of Ansar ud-Dine, Iyad Ag Ghali, a Touareg strong man who has been intimate with the Algerian military and security establishment since his days as leader of the nationalist MPLA in the early 1990s, basically hi-jacked the MNLA’s victory, replacing nationalism with Islamism and stating that his purpose was only Sharia law in the whole of Mali and not any kind of Touareg independence.  Suddenly, Ansar ud-Dine seemed to emerge as by far the strongest military group in the north, stuffed with well equipped, well paid and experienced fighters from the Ifoghas, the traditional ruling Touareg clan in the north east.  Where did Ag Ghaly find all the money to transform what had been a minor group comprising a few hundred men at the start of the uprising in January into the leading military power in the north.  Was it from his friends in Algeria?  Was it from super-wealthy contacts he made in Saudi Arabia back in 2007, when he was posted to the Malian consulate in Jeddah?  Was it from the Prince of Qatar, always happy to see the advancement of Salafist ideologies anywhere in the Muslim world?  Was it from rich local Arab drug barons?  Was it from the war chests of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, bloated by the proceeds of their kidnapping exploits in recent years?  Was it from a combination, or even all, of these?

Soon after the MNLA’s indepdence declaration on April 1st, AQIM and MUJAO surged from nowhere and grabbed Timbuktu and Gao respectively, both using Ag Ghali and Ansar ud-Dine as a kind of front to appease local Touareg.  Both these terror organizations were in effect representing the interests of local Arab-speaking populations and especially those of powerful Berabiche Arab and Tilemsi Arab drug smuggling dons, who also reviled the prospect of a Touareg dominated independent Azawad. The aims of these powerful Arabs chimed perfectly with those of the Algerian government, and with what was left of the Malian government as well: we all must prevent an independent Azawad at all costs. No one can understand what’s happening in northern Mali without trying to get to grips with Arab vs Touareg tribalism, which is a tale of mind-befuddling complexity and longevity in itself.

Then, a few weeks ago, MUJAO, with the backing of the local Songhai population, who were also desperately keen for Gao and the north to remain part of Mali, managed to kick the MNLA out of the city.  This was a major defeat, and an acute embarrassment, as the MNLA had long declared that Gao would be the capital city of their independent state. The dispirited, penniless and ill-disciplined Touareg rebel force had been given its comeuppance.  For the moment, the dream of an independent Touareg state lies dead in the water.  Since their defeat in Gao, word has it that MNLA leaders have been contemplating abandoning their erstwhile uncompromising demand for total independence, and talking to representatives of the African Union, ECOWAS and yes, even Mali itself, about creating an autonomous Touareg-dominated homeland in the north east, modeled on the state of Quebec in Canada, which would enjoy considerably greater economic, political and cultural freedoms than ever before but would, crucially, remain a part of Mali.  The theory goes that the MNLA might be able to rescue the situation, and their dignity, if they ally themselves with the rump of the Malian army and take the fight to the Islamists.  That way, they’ll get the African Union, ECOWAS, France, the US firmly behind their cause, but the price they’ll have to pay is the abandonment of their long-cherished dream of an independent Azawad.  “The rout of the Touareg of the MNLA in Gao is a good thing,” an Algerian DRS agent recently told the French magazine, Jeune Afrique. “Now, the ex-rebels will turn to the Malian army.”   In other words, Azawad is dead. Algeria is happy. Mission accomplished.

So what about the big Algeria – Terrorist collusion theory?  Did Algeria plan the Islamist hi-jack of the Touareg cause?  Did it mastermind it?  Did it finance it?  Or did events just spin themselves out with glorious serendipity?  Anybody who knows the long dark history of Islamic insurgency in Algeria also knows that the Algerian government is no stranger to the manipulation of Islamist movements.  There are examples aplenty of government collusion with terrorists from the bloody civil war of the 1990s.  The man who created the GSPC, the fore-runner of AQIM, Hassan Hattab, was an ex-Paratrooper in the Algerian army.  Amari Saïfi, aka Abderrazak ‘El Para’, who carried out the kidnapping of 32 western tourists in southern Algeria in 2003, the event that launched the kidnapping game in the southern Sahara, was not only an ex-Paratrooper, but also a special forces operative, trained in the USA and Russia, who spent time as a bodyguard to General Khaled Nezzar, one of Algeria’s most powerful men.  Iyad Ag Ghali made excellent links with the Algerian army and the DRS in the 1990s, as leader of the Touareg rebellion and in the 2000s, as a hostage-negotiator of choice.  So there’s form to support the theory.  But, unfortunately, no really hard evidence.  Hard solid copper-bottomed evidence, that’s what we hacks in the media need.  I do wish that Toumast Press, rather than just reporting hearsay, would distribute a few discreet cameras with telephoto lenses to friendly, and courageous, operatives in Gao and Timbuktu, so that they can capture any collusion between Algeria and the Islamists on film and post it on You Tube for the world to see.  Easier said than done, I know.  But we need that evidence, guys, and we need it badly.

In the end, whether Algeria has been playing chief puppeteer in northern Mali or whether fate has simply smiled on its parade, the recent turn of events has delivered almost everything that Algeria could have wished for.  Somehow, and I admit I don’t exactly know how, they have played an absolutely masterful game.

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